It’s currently -10° F and we’re bracing for the biggest snowstorm of the season here in Vermont, like much of the country.
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I’m still deep in book manuscript mode, and my writing bandwidth remains limited…
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But I thought I’d mix things up in this week’s issue of The Digital Contrarian with something different.
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Earlier this week, I delivered a session for members of my mastermind on the power of prototyping your ideas before launching your next project…
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And one of the things we covered was 5 Forms of Feedback to gather before your next launch.
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Because here’s the thing:
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Most launch failures are actually pre-launch failures.
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And for that reason, pre-launch feedback has always been at the heart of the ASK Method® as a means to de-risk before you commit to building or selling.
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What I’m about to share with you is a repeatable pre-launch feedback system you can adapt to virtually any project you might be launching.
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I’m going to use my book Return to Real as the example because that’s what I’m in the middle of working on right now, but you can adapt this system for any type of product you might have on the horizon.
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So without further delay, let’s explore each of these five forms of feedback and how you can start using this system yourself.
Loop 1: Owned Audience Signal (Newsletter)
One of the reasons why I love the weekly newsletter model so much is because it creates a platform for you to both prototype new ideas and get fast feedback on those ideas.
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I’m a big believer in using a HIT REPLY call-to-action in at least 1 out of every 4 emails you send as as way of measuring interest and demand.
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When you do this, it becomes obvious when something really lands with your audience, because you can compare the number of responses you receive against past HIT REPLY campaigns.
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For example, when I published [Issue #046] Brace for Impact: 3 Converging Forces, it received more feedback than almost any other issue I had written up until that point.
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That gave me a signal that what I wrote about had really landed – and it gave me the confidence to take what I wrote about in that newsletter and expand upon it in Part I my upcoming book.
Loop 2: Live Talk Signal (Keynotes)
When you present your ideas in front of a live audience, you can gauge facial expressions, body language, and emotional response to see what specific phrases and stories are most impactful.
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For example, this past year, I delivered over two dozen keynotes and presentations where I had the opportunity to workshop some of the ideas I’m writing about in Return to Real.
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Standup comedians will test and refine their sets at open mics and comedy clubs around country over and over again before doing their Netflix special to see which jokes perform best.
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They know they’re going to get laughs when the stakes are highest because they’ve stress-tested the content.
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Similarly, when you’re locking something in to a product (like a book), you want to first road-test the content, like we explored in [Issue #025] Tipping Points & The Scaleability of Half-Baked Ideas.
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In a perfect world you also want to get fresh, real-time feedback as soon as you’re finished delivering your talk.
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This can be in the form of simple reflections, shared takeaways, or simply paying really close attention to the questions and comments you receive (and the exact language used) when members of the audience come up to you after your presentation.
Loop 3: Heuristic Scoring (AI + Rubric)
AI is an excellent tool for short-listing and stress-testing a large number of ideas to help surface the strongest ones.
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This way, when you start putting your short-listed ideas in front of the limited number of precious real humans who are willing to give you feedback (see Loop 4), you’re not wasting time on ideas you could’ve eliminated with the help of AI and a good rubric.
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For example, with my book Return to Real I have stress-tested and scored nearly 100 different book subtitles, and have gone through dozens of iterations of my table of contents (TOC).
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BTW – If you’re working on something right now, and you’re not sure what criteria to include in your rubric to evaluate your ideas?
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Ask AI for what it thinks you should include in your rubric.
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For example, if you wanted to create a rubric to evaluate different email subject lines against one another, you could begin with the following simple prompt:
And then with that, you would have a simple rubric to help evaluate the list of email subject lines you’re considering, like the following:
Bonus Tip: Ask AI to give you 5 ideas that score higher than the ones you’ve come up with on your own.
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Naturally, AI has its limits, and you will want to get real human feedback on your final short-listed ideas before you go live. But AI should be part of every feedback loop system.
Loop 4: Structural Prototype (TOC / Outline)
It’s really important that you put your table of contents (TOC) or outline of your product in front of real people before you commit to writing/building what that TOC/outline covers.
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Ideally these are tight 10-15 min 1:1 conversations, where you’re presenting your TOC/outline and identifying 1) the “hell yeah” chapters, 2) the ones they’d probably skip, and 3) the ones they’d forward to a friend.
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Anything that doesn’t get multiple “hell yeahs” and multiple “forward to a friends” is something that shouldn’t get built. Period.
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Last year I held 25 x 1:1 conversations with readers who generously gave me feedback on the 2nd draft of my book’s TOC.
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It saved me from making one or two BIG mistakes going deep into topics that readers simply didn’t care about.
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BTW – If you don’t have access to your own audience, you can use a tool like PickFU.com which I’m a big fan of for quick feedback:
What I like about this platform, is that in a matter of minutes and for just a few dollars, you can set up a simple poll to test things like book titles, chapter titles, book covers – and get feedback from real humans nearly instantly.
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For example, there were two book subtitles I wanted to test head-to-head against one another, and I was able to get a winner in under 20 minutes.
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If I had set up something like a Facebook ad split-test to gather this same data (like we used to have to do), it would’ve taken me hours (or maybe even days) for the feedback to come back to me.
Loop 5: Beta Readers (Real Customers)
The last loop is to get actual customers in front of your actual product.
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Now, depending on what you’re creating – like with software, for instance – this could involve dozens of customers over multiple iterations of your product.
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But at a minimum, you should get real people going through what you’ve created before anything you build gets set in stone.
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In terms of writing a book, beta readers are an absolute non-negotiable.
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With Return to Real – I’m using a great tool called HelpThisBookOut.com to gather and organize reader feedback.
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(This tool was co-created by Rob Fitzpatrick, who is also the author of Write Useful Books, which is a great read.)
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BTW – If you would be interested in being a beta reader for Return to Real, please SEND ME AN EMAILÂ to let me know. I’m currently looking for a small handful of beta readers for next month (Feb). You would be getting an early, advance copy of the manuscript – and an opportunity to be part of the project, and have your feedback incorporated into the final book.
Bonus: 12 Questions Beyond the DDS
Lastly…
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If you’re a student of the ASK Method, then you’re likely very familiar with the concept of the Deep Dive Survey (DDS). I’m not going to retread that ground here in this newsletter as I’ve covered it extensively in my first book, Ask.
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But what I wanted to leave you with as a “bonus” in today’s issue, are a dozen additional questions worth getting feedback on to help further de-risk your next project and help stack the deck in your favor.
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Because embedded within each of the feedback loops above is essentially a Deep Dive Survey in one form or another – giving you a combination of open-ended and close-ended feedback.
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So to wrap today’s issue, without further delay…
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Here are 12 additional questions worth adding to your market research toolkit:
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- What are you trying to improve right now?
- What’s the most frustrating part of that?
- What have you already tried?
- Why didn’t it work (in your words)?
- What would “fixed” look like in concrete terms?
- What’s the cost of not fixing it?
- What are you afraid might be true about your situation?
- What solutions do you distrust and why?
- What would make you say “this is different”?
- What would you want included for it to be a no-brainer?
- What would stop you from buying/doing it?
- If you could ask an expert one question, what is it?
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Which one is YOUR personal favorite?
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Okay! I’m going to leave you with that for now.
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Back to manuscript writing for me and freezing my butt off with these crazy cold temps.
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Have a GREAT rest of your weekend…
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Remember to hug the ones you love…
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And until next week,
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Ryan :-)
