Ignore your Customers’ Opinions

If you wish to learn whether your product or idea will succeed in the market, do not ask your customers for their opinion. Don’t do it! The data you gather from their opinions will ultimately prove useless and irrelevant because it is user behaviour, not opinions, that tells you whether people want to use your product.

Nate Bolt and Tony Tulathimutte, in a recent article on VentureBeat.com, assert that, “opinions are often inconsistent with behaviors or other attitudes”. So your market research should instead examine user behaviour if you want a reliable measure of the potential for your product.

Bolt and Tulathimutte list three things you can do to get a sense of whether people would use your product or service.