Matt Bendett advises founders Maria and Bren on gathering customer feedback systematically. He recommends embedding feedback collection into company culture, running focus groups and surveys, and involving the product team early to avoid overwhelming backlogs. Vendors share insights more readily than consumers, requiring deliberate effort to hear from both sides.
Hey, Bren, do you wanna come on? I saw you sent me a message.
Thank you so much. And Matt, this was really, really helpful. I've got my co-founder on the line, Maria, as well. We are the founders of Our Day, which is a platform that matches consumers with event vendors. How did you handle getting as much like feedback as possible and implementing it? How did you prioritize getting feedback and then turning it around into the product?
Yeah, you have to make it part of your operating DNA. Either someone needs to own it or you or it's part of the company culture to always be talking to your customers. We did a lot of things in the early days where we would set up community events to make it like a fun, casual experience. But there was a definite focus for our team to get customer feedback in those sessions. So we might set it up as like a panel where they would hear from, you know, our product team about new features we were launching or taking their requests for features. But we were recording all of that information And we were also trying to get a read on who these people were and what their needs and challenges are. We also, you know, have done lots of focus testing, either one-on-one or kind of group settings. Found it pretty easy to do on Zoom. I think you're— it's harder on the demand side than the supply side. The supply side is sort of wedded to you. in a marketplace, right? They get their business through you. And so they're very eager to share feedback and it's easier to talk to them and bounce things off the wall with them. With the demand side, it can be a little trickier and you just have to, you have to stay on it and make sure that you're getting a good swath of different potential audience customer feedback sessions in. And then, you know, you get— so that, that's what you do qualitative. Quantitatively, we've done, you know, you can do customer surveys if you have a captive audience to collect enough information there. And you can also put little thing pop-ups into your product if you're able to do so to gather information. We would do lots of painted door tests with functionality, which would be like, hey, we're considering this. Oh, thanks. Well, let you know when it's live, you know, depending on how they click. And so it, I guess, as I'm saying that out loud, that brings up another good point is like, just if you're on the ops side, making sure product is bought in on, on these things early on versus coming to them with like a list of 50 things that they need to go add to the product because you've heard about it. So finding ways to, you know, collect that feedback and Make sure your product team is sort of an active participant in that, whether they're like doing calls with you or they just know what you're undertaking and are expecting to receive, you know, a prioritized list at the end can be really helpful. I will say something that companies need to just, and founders just need to get comfortable with is you're always gonna have a ton of customer insights and feedback that you really want to get into the product. And you're gonna, it's gonna be hard. You're not always like some, some of the things that we really wanted to do the most would sit in the backlog for years, honestly. And it's not because people didn't wanna make it happen. It was just, you know, we didn't have a team of 500 devs, you know, and, you know, 30 different pods to be able to, to get everything in and, and You know, what you, what you're reminded of is, and maybe it's another reason for having like a good customer service team is like, you, you can still get by, right? There are ways to figure out how to solve customers' problems without fully being reliant on your technology.
