Lesson: Design & Prototyping with Devika Patel & Natalie Griffen

Step #3 Customer Feedback: Fully exhaust your network in search of customer feedback

To reach out to a broad audience, it's been pretty easy at Stanford. For example for the shoe project, I would just send out surveys to first all of the sorority lists because I knew they would catch people's eye. But even to freshman dorm lists, etc. That's really easy, just sending it out to lists.

The coffeemaker, it was really easy, through Kickstarter. You just put it online for everybody to see and again the cold emailing, it's a huge thing. I think it's super, super important. Really working the existing network that you do have, so emailing somebody that you think might know somebody else, that will know somebody else, and then eventually from that, for the Duo coffeemaker, we got the founder of TechCrunch to Tweet us. It's not something that I ever would have foreseen happening but it was super helpful.

Kickstarter really helped the Duo reach a lot of people really easily just because you put it out there for everybody to see, and it's also very important to work your existing networks. Even though you might not know somebody that you really want to contact, you might know somebody, who knows somebody, who knows that person. We eventually got the founder of TechCrunch to Tweet us which was super helpful because at the end of the day, it just matters how many eyes see it. From that, I think, weirdly that is where the success comes; it's just how many people can see it.

The Duo coffeemaker began really before I got involved. Jake had already taken the coffeemaker to these trade shows where he got to test out his initial prototype with people and get feedback. From there we would take our more advanced prototype that I had become involved in, and we would take that to friends and we would send pictures to, really a lot of people that we knew just to get the visual feedback because we knew that it would function well. Then we just got it in as many people's hand as we could, which was really easy to do because we were working in the Venture Studio up in the business school. So there were business school kids just filtering in and out and we could ask them their opinions on a lot of what we were doing.