Latest / Imagine If with Doone Roisin | Health, Wealth & Wisdom for Women (formerly Female Startup Club Podcast) / Part 4. The step-by-step breakdown of my survey that got 100s of responses in 48 hrs

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Part 4. The step-by-step breakdown of my survey that got 100s of responses in 48 hrs · Imagine If with Doone Roisin | Health, Wealth & Wisdom for Women (formerly Female Startup Club Podcast)

• 0:00
  Hey, hello, it's me, Dune, your host and hype girl. Today's episode is a mini masterclass in how I approached my customer survey for the non-alcoholic wine brand. If you think this is boring, obviously let me know. If you think this is great, please do let me know. And if you have any ideas or suggestions on what you want to hear next, definitely slide into my inbox and let me know. Let's get stuck into this episode. This is me for Female Startup Club.
• 0:29
  Hello everyone. In today's mini episode, I'm trying out something new. I'm going to be giving you a step-by-step lesson in how I did my customer survey. I'm going to talk a little bit about the questions, what I included. I'm going to talk a little bit about what I thought we did really well and also what we didn't do very well and that I would do differently second time around.
• 0:55
  Before we get into that, I have just been browsing some of the brand Instagram accounts in Hype Club, which if you don't know, it's our private network for founders who are building CPG brands who happen to be women. And I just want to take a minute to tell you about one that is just so much fun. It's called Swear by Skin, and it's this futuristic, dreamy, lilac purple, orange
• 1:22
  ultra, ultra cool LED face mask that does all the things that you want a face mask to do, like anti-aging, anti-acne, anti-pigmentation, you know, all of that good stuff. And it is just so fun and different to all the face tech
• 1:41
  tools that I've seen on the market recently. So if you're on the lookout for the next cool thing that's totally Insta-worthy and results-driven, check out this female-founded small biz doing cool stuff that's worth talking about. Sinead Ray is the founder and it's called Swear by Skin, which you can find on Instagram.
• 2:03
  So let's get into this mini masterclass. Let's call it a mini masterclass. In so many episodes on the show, founders have told me about the customer research piece and surveying potential customers or your ideal target market to get a true understanding of what they're thinking, you know, get some insights, get some proof points. And
• 2:27
  just generally triple check that you're on the right track and that people are interested in what you're doing. So I'm definitely in the camp of talking to as many people about my idea as possible. I'm not inventing something new. I've got no secret sauce around me here. So I'm all about the sharing and, you know, getting insights from other people. And that obviously flows through to things like customer surveys.
• 2:54
  And since I'm learning from the best, now more than 200 successful entrepreneurs, it means I'm following the blueprint, like to the T, literally, for the non-alc wine company. So today I'm going to give you that step-by-step breakdown of the survey that we did and the key takeaways and what I would do differently. So step one.
• 3:18
  It's so straightforward. It's so basic. But before I jump into it, I actually think that a lot of people miss this step and think that they do have a really good understanding and it's not 100% necessary. And that might be true. Like we felt very confident about the non-alc.
• 3:38
  space in general and where, you know, the category was going and the research that we'd done. But I still think doing this kind of thing is just so critical to get little gems and little nuggets that you might not have realized or you might have overlooked or you might, you know, have just not thought too much about. So...
• 4:01
  Step one, I literally just whipped out a Google Doc and started jotting down a bunch of different questions. So did PA. We didn't worry too much about crafting it or anything because I just wanted to get everything down and then go back and craft slash tweak it afterwards. And I don't know about you, but I'm someone that loves to hear things spelled out super clearly. So
• 4:24
  On that note, I was thinking that I would just read you question by question the questions that we basically finished with and published in the survey so that you could get a really clear understanding of what we included in ours. Yeah.
• 4:38
  So we ended up doing this in a Google form or Google survey. I think it's called Google forms. It's totally free. Didn't cost us anything. This is a whole zero dollar budget thing. So it was titled drinking behavior for wine and sparkling. So the whole thing is centered around people who do drink wine. And we were trying to understand the mindset and behavior around drinking wine and drinking sparkling wine.
• 5:04
  So question number one was, what gender do you identify as? I'm just going to kind of run through them. Some I might talk a bit more in detail about, but, you know, some of them are just so straightforward. Question two, do you drink alcohol? Yes, no, or rarely? Which drink, when it comes to wine, do you enjoy the most? And you're able to rank them in order of preference. So rosé, red, white, sparkling, and you could choose your favorite, and then you could choose your second favorite.
• 5:33
  What is the main thing you enjoy about drinking? And the options were the taste, the ritual, the feeling, like that buzz, you know, relaxation feeling you can get, the social aspect around it, or the education around wine and like the history of wine. How would you describe yourself? And you could select not a wine or sparkling lover,
• 6:00
  Love to drink wine and sparkling, but don't know much about it. Wine sparkling lover or wine sparkling connoisseur? I think for me, I fit into the second one and the third one. Love wine, but don't know too much about it outside what PA tells me, which I do love.
• 6:22
  I mean, that's not true. I actually do know a lot about wine, I think, having been around him for so many years now and obviously through this process. But let's continue. How much do you typically spend on your average bottle when it comes to USD? So we had, again, multiple answers that you could select 1 to 5, 5 to 10, 10 to 15, 15 to 20, 20 to 30 and 30 plus. Yeah.
• 6:48
  Has there been a time in your life where you tried to reduce your alcohol consumption? Yes, no. Has there been a time in your life where you haven't been able to drink for some reason or another? And if yes, what was that reason? And so the options we had there were pregnancy, sober month, medical reasons, health or religion. And sober month was kind of like dry January. I think there's another one in October that people do that kind of thing.
• 7:16
  During that period, did you find yourself wanting other types of drinks instead of alcohol? Yes, no. What was it that you missed the most? The taste, the ritual, the social life, the buzz or something else? Other. Is having a glass of wine or sparkling built into your weekly ritual? Yes, no or other.
• 7:38
  How much wine or sparkling wine would you consume on a weekly basis? One to two glasses, three to five glasses, one to two bottles, two to three bottles or three plus bottles?
• 7:50
  And then this is where we kind of go into describing a little bit about the project, which when I come back to my kind of like takeaways at the end, I'm not sure if this was the right approach. But we wrote, we've been working on a non-alc sparkling wine using 100% French grapes alongside our partner, an award-winning French Master Somme.
• 8:12
  This product focuses on the highest quality ingredients, removing unnecessary sugar and calories to bring a better for you product to the category. Would a non-alcoholic sparkling like this interest you? Yes, no other. If yes, how much would you pay for it? 5 to 10, 10 to 15, 15 to 20, 20 to 30 and 30 plus.
• 8:35
  When and which kind of occasions do you think you would drink something like this? At a dinner party, at a bar, at a restaurant, at home, or at events like a wedding, baby showers, functions, day events, that vibe?
• 8:53
  Now we kind of move into the non-alcoholic side of things. So have you ever tried non-alcoholic options and it was multiple choice and multiple answers allowed, spirits, beers, wine, sparkling, or other? Did you think it was worth it? Did it satisfy the itch? And then you could rank one to five. What would be important to you when deciding on a non-alcoholic beverage? And we had calories, price, quality, and taste.
• 9:25
  what country do you live in? And then we have, you know, every country. Well, actually, now that I'm looking at this, people added all their countries and holy moly, there's people from all over the world. That's crazy. Okay. Anyway, I'm going to scroll through here because there's so many. Or maybe, no, actually, you know what? I think maybe because...
• 9:51
  shows you all the different countries, although there were a lot of different answers from different countries. But anyway, next question. Do you have any additional comments or feedback you'd like to share when it comes to non-alc beverages? Anything we might not have thought about? And this was actually where the true magic of the customer survey lies because we had so many funny little tidbits and notes and things put into this section that I really liked. I'll
• 10:20
  And then we ended with, would you be willing to participate in a one-to-one interview to assist further? And if yes, please leave your email so we can be in touch. We made the survey anonymous. So if people wanted to take that next step, they could leave their email.
• 10:37
  And then just a thank you message. And could you please share this with some of your friends? So that's basically literally the survey that we did. Feel free to copy it based on your industry or what you're doing if you think that's valuable to you. It's quite lengthy, I'd say. It definitely took a couple of minutes to fill it out. But
• 11:00
  A lot of people did fill it up, which we were really happy about. From there, like the next step was three of us, the three of us, the three business partners, sent it just on WhatsApp to a bunch of folks we knew and asked them to send it to a friend just to try and get it outside of our own friendship slash personal networks. And the result of this was we had about 220 responses in 48 hours. So yeah.
• 11:27
  I don't know if that's good. I don't know if it's not good, but it felt good. And we were pretty happy about it. We also got a lot of interesting data points when it came to price point. For example, we were really pleasantly surprised at what people were willing to pay for something like this that we're going to be bringing to the market. We had...
• 11:48
  a lot of stories and notes left in that open field section that I was just talking about. And we also had 67 people leave their email for us to reach out to do a face-to-face interview. I think another thing that we really felt in the beginning, PA was kind of more feeling that, you know, it's not 100% necessary to do the survey when I was like, no, we need to do the survey. And
• 12:17
  we were all feeling really great after we did it. We felt like the assumptions and hypothesis that we had were really proven. And now that we had that backed by data, we could charge forward with conviction in what we were doing and, you know, turn around to anyone with a question and be like, well, this is what we know from, you know, a random group of people that we surveyed. So I can share with you a little bit of the feedback that we got from,
• 12:47
  it kind of like echoed what we were feeling, which I guess just really showed us that we're on the right track. So someone says, all the current non-alcohol options aren't very high end. They lack in taste. Non-alcoholic beverages should be the new cool. Alcohol is the most dangerous drug on the planet. Interested to see what's possible for quality and taste. Non-alcoholic spirits are great, but wine is bad on taste.
• 13:16
  I think the sweetness is the problem. It's hard to find a non-alc wine that's nice and dry. We agree. And then someone left this comment. I'm just trying to find it. Oh, yeah. Make the bottle really fucking pretty.
• 13:31
  So whoever said that? So lol, I agree. We want to make it stand out on the shelf. Okay, so that was some of the feedback. And, you know, that's just, you know, three examples. We have a million of those kind of left from all the different people. And it's just amazing to read through and...
• 13:48
  A lot of people actually also came forward being like, hey, I actually spent many years working in beverage or beer or seltzers or whatever, and happy to jump on a call and help you if you want to. So really loved that. What I think we did well was speed. I'm someone that just loves to get it together, get it out. That's my specialty. We got it out to a few hundred people and had some really clear insights after that 48-hour period. And yeah.
• 14:17
  you know, we didn't like dwell on the questions for very long. Like this was just a really simple, like let's get something out there and get some insights. I think it was also great to keep it anonymous, but leaving that space for free text at the end where people could share their thoughts or like notes and dropping that email should they wish to follow up with us, especially 67 people who are potentially our target customers and who are willing to try our product. Once we have samples, that's awesome.
• 14:46
  That's like our focus group right there. And 67 people, I don't know, to me that sounds like a lot. What I would do differently, and I would do things differently, actually, in hindsight. Recently, circling back to Hype Club again, we had our first mentor session with Kaylee from Sisto, who's been on the show recently.
• 15:06
  a couple months ago, which was so mind-blowing, by the way. She was saying, and we were having a discussion around the customer survey piece and her advice for that for the women in the group who hadn't launched yet. And her viewpoint was don't tell your target customers what you're doing at all
• 15:26
  just so you can rather like build a super clear, unbiased look at the current habits and behaviors and routines of your ideal customer. So I actually think in hindsight, I would take that approach and really not share what we were doing to get a better look at the behavior and habits, but such is life.
• 15:45
  I also got some feedback that it wasn't broad enough for people who don't drink alcohol at all slash never have drunk alcohol at all. And I do see where that feedback was coming from. But I also think for someone who doesn't drink at all, it's probably not our target market because we want people who were wine drinkers or are wine drinkers and, you know, enjoy wine.
• 16:10
  We're very much kind of focused on people who are wanting to reduce or switch out or need to stop for a specific reason, but someone who has been a drinker in the past. But anyway, I thought it was good food for thought and definitely key to take that kind of stuff on board and know for next time.
• 16:30
  So yeah, I would say all in all, this is a really important step. It gave us the proof and the evidence we needed to feel really confident in this category and our general approach to the project. And it also gave us a group of highly engaged beta users when we've got those samples ready to ship.
• 16:48
  So that's it. That's today's mini masterclass. I hope you loved it. I hope you want to share this. I hope you want to leave me a review in the Apple podcast app if you're feeling extra sparkly today. Also, I don't know if I've mentioned this already, but last week we were in the top 20 for entrepreneurship in Australia, which just blows my mind. And it's all because of you guys listening and sharing and, you know, leaving reviews and all that kind of stuff. So
• 17:13
  I say this a lot, but thank you so much. Literally, I am just so grateful. And I feel like I need to tell you that all the time because I am.
• 17:23
  Last thing before I jump off, if you're interested in checking out Hype Club, we've got a stage two beta price live on the website, which you can access by going to femalestartupclub.com forward slash Hype Club. You just need to be a woman in e-commerce building a CPG brand. It doesn't need to have been launched yet. You just need to be actively working on it. So yeah.
• 17:47
  Feel free to also slide into my DMs if you have any questions. I'd love some, you know, ideas of things that you want to hear for these mini masterclass episodes. And let me know what you think. Have the best day. Bye.
• 18:20
  Hey, it's June here. Thanks for listening to this amazing episode of the Female Startup Club podcast. If you're a fan of the show and want even more of the good stuff, I'd recommend checking out femalestartupclub.com where you can subscribe to our free newsletter. We send it out weekly covering female founder business news, insights and learnings in D2C, and interesting business resources.
• 18:44
  And if you're a founder building an e-commerce brand, you can join our private network of entrepreneurs called Hype Club at femalestartupclub.com forward slash Hype Club. We have guests from the show joining us for intimate Ask Me Anythings, expert workshops, and a group of totally amazing, like-minded women building the future of D2C brands.
• 19:07
  As always, please do subscribe, rate and review the show and post your favorite episodes to Instagram stories. I am beyond grateful when you do that.