Ask HN: Questions lie and mislead. Data does not.

2 points by Rhodee ↗ HN
My founders and I conducted customer research to suss out what feature ideas customers really wanted from our web application. Digging deeper into data, our demographics suggests our prospective customer will be female 3 out of 4 times. As a prudent, behind-the-numbers and first-time founder, I need to make this information actionable.

To these ends, would the front-end engineer, graphic design or UI professionals on HN, particularly the female members, be willing to share their insights offline or post links to model web applications with a sentance describing why they think its a good model?

Grateful,

Rhodee

12 comments

[ 8.3 ms ] story [ 35.6 ms ] thread
Ask away. I'm female. I also need guys' opinions for my current app and would be happy to make the trade :) Find me on Facebook lqnguyen at gmail
Great will ping with email address. Happy to barter!
Suggestion: Ask your actual customers. There's a good chance HN users in general are so far out of your demographic that feedback from here doesn't help you at all.

It's not like all women share this secret stash of female knowledge ;)

The greatest trick women have ever played is convincing the world they don't share secret stashes of female knowledge.
If there is a T-shirt in the future of that quote, can I get attribution credit :)
We're in concept validation mode. We basically have a feel for the 'tent' we want to build and will fill in features as we better define our niches. Right now we are in 'is this worth our time' mode!

Thanks for the feedback!

You're getting demographics data out of customer research around features? That doesn't sound right, could you describe your research methodology a bit more?
Let me be a bit clearer. We created a survey asking people questions related to our concept and deployed it using ask your target market (AYTM). We reached a nationwide sample slightly above 100 people ranging from 18 to 55. 75% of respondents identified as female.
So from this you then concluded that your target market was largely female? That seems like a mistake. It just means that the respondents of the service you used tend to be female.
I "self identify as female". But I can't find a link to your site. You can email me from one of the sites in my profile...though be forewarned that I tend to be a statistical outlier no matter what the topic, so I have no idea how representative I can be of the secret stash of female knowledge you seek.
We're plugging away as I type so no page right now apologies. Will follow-up via email.