Customer research = secrets?

An interesting article by Vinicius Vacanti, founder/CEO of Yipit: The Secrets Behind Many Successful Startups. In 2010 Yipit knew a secret about what was happening in the daily deals marketplace (that daily deals were exploding) and they were able to take advantage of it by creating a daily deals aggregator.

What struck me about the post, however, was that the other “secrets” weren’t really secrets at all. They were simply observations about customer behavior that signaled what people were interested in. The observation that people like sharing photos was the turning point for Burbn (now Instagram). The observation that people liked seeing what they were up to years ago was a turning point for Timehop. In the case of BlueApron, the team found out that there was already a solution people were using successfully:

“They started thinking about the food space and an interesting product idea that would deliver to people three great recipes and all the ingredients needed to cook the meals. Upon doing research, the secret they learned is that there was a company in Sweden that had been doing something similar since 2007 and had been extremely successful. That certainly gave them and investors confidence to pursue the idea here in the US which they called BlueApron.”

These observations (about both product and market) are what anybody doing any amount of product design should be able to find out. And pretty easily. I think the lesson here is that as a product designer you need to be observing and talking to your users enough to notice these things…and familiar enough with the market to know what’s going on there. Sure it may be a secret because other people don’t know…but from the standpoint of product research anybody in those spaces should be able to find them out with plain ol’ research.

We need to demystify user research. It’s not black magic…it’s really just talking to people.