902 – Getting new ideas: Tom talks Focus Groups

Episode 902 – Focus Groups
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey everybody! It's Tom here with episode 902 of Screw the Commute podcast. Today, we're going to talk about what I promised you on last episode. Focus Groups. And that leads us to episode 900. I hope you didn't miss it. It's called How to Lose a Debate. And this is not political at all. It's just something that happened in the lead up to the debate made me think of how business people are messing things up. And so it's not political, but it's how to lose a debate. Anytime you want to get to a back episode, you go to screwthecommute.com, slash, then the episode number. That was 901 and today is 902. Focus groups.

[00:01:05] Well, focus groups can really help you decide on ideas for products. It can make your product better before you ever make the product or come out with the idea or service that you're planning on. And it could save you a boatload in telling you, hey, you know what? Nobody really wants this product or this idea that I came up with. Maybe I shouldn't waste any time or money to develop it. And for bigger companies, that can be millions of dollars in development costs for something that people don't even want. So we're going to give you ideas for, even if you're a one person show, to develop focus groups to help you with all these things, to decide if you want a product or not, or how to make it better before you make it, and all those things.

[00:02:00] Even a product that already exists, you can use a focus group to make it better. Go over flaws in the product for ideas to fix them. All kinds of things that come from people that are in your focus groups. All right. So a little bit about them, we want to make sure that the people in the focus groups do not know you or we don't want them to know each other. We don't want any kind of bias brought into the system. We want a leader of the focus group. That's not you. Because see, what the problem is, is if people know you, they're going to not want to hurt your feelings on one hand, or they might want to sabotage you because they don't really like you or they're jealous of you. I mean, all these kinds of factors that I can't prove and you can't prove, but may exist by people that know you. So we want people that don't know you. A really good idea is make the focus group anonymous so they don't even know that it's you, or make it seem like it's a big company doing a focus group so that there's no one person or personality that is going to cause bias in the responses from the people in the focus group. I, uh, I usually tease about, you know, the, the poor man's focus group.

[00:03:31] Like for your website, I tell people to get a person to look at your website, put a video camera on them, give them a piece of paper and a pencil to write down what they. When they're trying to navigate your website and get a baseball bat and they say baseball bat. Yeah. So if you are watching this happen of them trying to navigate your website and all the questions that they have, if you have any inkling or urge to jump in and say no, no, you should click here, take the baseball bat and hit yourself in the head. Head with it because you're not going to be there to help them navigate your site. See, so that's a, uh, the poor man's or poor woman's or poor what it's way to to, uh, at least improve your website for very little or no money. All right. Other than buying a baseball bat. All right, all right, now, another thing about the people in the group, they should be fairly homogeneous. In other words, you don't want a 15 year old and a and a 60 year old in the group about your product. Now, it would be okay to have a whole bunch of 15 year olds if their parents are there, of course, or a whole bunch of 60 year olds, but it's just too much, too big a difference in.

[00:05:00] And the discussion going on from the different perspectives that it's just going to confuse you. So it's okay to have multiple groups. In fact, uh, most of the time you 3 or 4 by most standards are better. That gives you the most valid results in your focus group, and you want it to be a free flowing discussion. And when you quit doing focus groups on that particular idea or product is when you're not getting anything new from anybody. If you keep getting new stuff, that's, oh man, I never thought of that. Never thought of that, then keep going. Okay, let's see now standard is about 8 to 10 questions that stimulate discussion. And you don't want questions that have yes or no answers. You want short questions that are very clear. You want to make sure they're non-threatening or embarrassing. Unless you're doing like a zoom call with no videos on and no names involved. Then you could have, you know, because there are products and services that could be embarrassing for people, I get that. So you got to do a little bit different. You don't want them in person. And you know, because you won't get as many people to show up. Now how do you get people to be in your focus groups? Again? I said, I don't want people that know you, uh, even even if I was going to do a focus group, I wouldn't advertise it to my email list because they all purport to know me in some fashion.

[00:06:44] They know it's me behind it. They know my personality. If they've been on the list for a while, they may have been on webinars with me and see what I'm all about. I mean, so I don't want that. I want totally unbiased opinion. So how do you get that? Well, you could advertise for people, offer an incentive, 2550 bucks for opinions on stuff. Now if they have to show up in person. Well, you know, you might have to have a place to do it. Uh, you really need to make it easy for them to attend. You might need some food and, uh, refreshments for them. This is a very powerful thing, but if you do it incorrectly, the results aren't going to mean anything. In other words, if you just put it out to your email list. Now, I'm not opposed to putting an email list out and doing a poll or asking for opinions on an idea, but it's always going to be taken with a grain of salt because the people know me. There are some tips on doing focus groups. I'm telling you, it's really powerful way to either save you a ton of developing an idea that nobody wants or thinks is stupid, all right, or making a product better because of things you didn't think of because you're too close to it.

[00:08:06] So it's a really powerful thing if you do it right. So. So that's my story and I'm sticking to it. Make sure you grab a copy of my automation e-book. It's screwthecommute.com/automatefree and check out my mentor program at GreatInternetMarketingTraining.com. And if you're interested in a free strategy session, if it makes sense for both of us now, you'll understand that when you see the application, you go to screwthecommute.com/application and if it makes sense for you and it makes sense for me, I'll do it for you. It's worth 500 bucks. But you know, my my point is I want to introduce you to my mentor program. It's not a big sales pitch, but if you know, if you're totally like, no, screw you. I don't have $0.02, I'm never going to get in your program. Well, it doesn't make sense for both of us, but if you're qualified and serious and you want to make major jumps because of my experience and you have access to my whole team, check out screwthecommute.com/application, and then it'll come to me through email. I'll review it and let you know if it makes sense for both of us. All right. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it. We'll catch you all on the next episode. See you later.