Quantitative Research on Target Groups

Marketing
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Thank you to everyone who participated in the qualitative round of market research into the 4 target groups! The responses were highly illuminating, and helped me to draw together a discrete list of target-group-identified benefits, features, high-potential projects, and exchange preferences.

With this information, I have coded a 15-question mostly multiple choice survey that can be completed in ~5 to 10 minutes. My goal is to send out the survey by Monday Feb 15.

As I’m sure you know by now, I believe in data and evidence-based decision-making. Therefore, we need to get as many responses as possible, and preferably with a large sample of people who aren’t MaidSafe fans (i.e. part of this community). To help encourage participation (hopefully amongst non-community members) I will give away 10 $10 Amazon gift cards in a randomized drawing. If you are willing to help make this quantitative exercise a success by either sharing the final link to this survey or donating to sponsor additional Amazon gift cards, please let me know. :smile:

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need permission to the google form

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First thing it asked me to do is sign into google. The people I wanted to ask are a mixed bag and I think most will not want to sign into google to do it. It’ll be hard enough to get permission of the group to share the questionnaire even though they want the Safe Network and also very doubtful they are interested enough to join this forum.

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Any chance you can host it somewhere else @Sotros25 ?
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Does it need to be restricted? It should be able to be set to no restrictions.

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I support quantitative statistics and analysis. I think it is also important to have in mind that any statistics and such is better seen as a guidance to decision making and not as a truth or something similar.

It is common in quantativ studies that people respond to what they wish was the reality, who they wish they are, don’t remember correct or interpret questions in an unwanted way. Also that the people who answer the questions are to few or/and not representative of a larger segment population or similar.

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I agree with this, random errors or weird breaking of rules/ statistical outliers etc. is what makes natural systems evolve (even gene mutations etc.). So I am 100% behind this thought.

Stats are great for general direction IMO, like surveys etc. they a rough guide, even when you can have answers to 100 decimal places, it makes no difference they are just general direction.

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@gILisH, @neo, @JPL, @Josh: try the link now. I figured out what setting to change (accept people outside of my “organization”) so that anyone should be able to access the link. This is my first time using Google Forms (because it’s free and there is no funding for this…).

The survey will not require people to log-in to Google or share their email addresses (unless they want to be entered into the Amazon gift card drawing b/c I’d need somewhere to send the digital gift card).

With regards to @tobbetj’s comments: this is obvious. The need for a large and more statistically representative n is why I’m putting my money down to increase the range of respondents. Ideally, I would work with an actual vendor who would recruit an indexed panel, but hey…I’m doing what I can. If you’d like to financially support this survey effort, let me know.

With regards to @dirvine’s comments. You need data for it to be at least directional. To be honest, this almost sounds like executives I’ve dealt with in the past who don’t value consumer insights. That’s a bit worrisome. If data answers to 100 decimal places “makes no difference” to you, that’s a bit frightening.

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David, I think you are conflating two issues.
Of course innovation can’t be predicted by statistics as they are just a snapshot of what exists today. Yes, of course revolutionary inventions can’t just be predicted by simply extrapolating existing ones. Yes, serendipity has been the main factor for paradigm shifts and revolutionary scientific discoveries. Physically speaking entropy is ironically the main mechanism for both our evolution and our future demise.

But that is not the subject here. To get adoption now or in the near future you need information about today or the near future. Empirical data and market research will place your feet on the ground to see if people will even want to get what you want to offer, and if they do how to communicate better what you are offering so it is much easier for them to adopt it.

You seem to bring again the very old debate about being product-centric or consumer-centric. This debate has been settled by decades of empirical evidence from the failures of technology titans, and if we don’t learn from their mistakes having their experiences at hand…

If we ignore these experiences, then we are just tossing a coin in the air hoping that mother serendipity will favor us, instead of purposefully increasing the odds in our favor by applying existing tools in our advantage.

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It might not be in line with the kind of thinking required to design natural systems but it is still valuable. Your work is not going unnoticed or unappreciated @Sotros25. So far engagement is looking good. How would one help fund this effort?

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Done! Thanks

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Exactly. The results of self-selected surveys shouldn’t be taken as gospel in terms of the actual numbers, but they can be incredibly useful in testing assumptions and trends, comparing preferences for different options and helping to identify the courses of action most likely to be successful.

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Well put! Some data is better than no data.

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Thanks, Nigel! Often times it does feel like there’s a lot of opposition here, so I greatly appreciate the support :smile:

In terms of how to help:

  • Please share the link to the survey on as many platforms as possible (e.g. Twitter, Reddit, other forums, Hackernews if they accept such, etc.) that don’t mostly have Safe Community members. Once I know how many gift cards will be available for the drawing, I’ll draft up comms to share with the link.

  • If you’d like to sponsor gift cards, tell me how many you’d like to sponsor and how you’d like to donate funds. If you’d like, you can send the equivalent in crypto or fiat. Whatever works for you. Alternatively, I could share winners email addresses with you and you can directly send the gift cards. Either way, let me know how many $10 gift cards you’d be willing to sponsor, so I can include the totals available in the comms for the survey.

  • Another community member (who wishes to remain anonymous) has volunteered to send a survey taker 1000 MAID, so that could be an option. It would require collecting public addresses from survey takers, & we’d have to be careful about making sure it doesn’t sound spammy.

Great, thank you! :smile:

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That is what I was saying.

That’s not me. I value them appropriately.

Ok try it like this. Data answers what in particular and specifically regardless of any further context? Then you sill see what I mean.

Early days of training A.I. from Internet data. The A.I. Thought water flowed uphill as that was the most common conclusion from the data (you see folk don’t say water flows downhill to make a point, they use the negative to disprove a point).

In any case I do value data, but I am also aware of how badly wrong it can be, look at recent elections. look at the age of massive increases in middle management and tick sheet mentality. In the '90s where the NHS had doctors replaced with managers and data collectors.

If you watch some Adam Curtis and in particular [EDIT (I used the wrong docu link here) hypernormalisation HyperNormalisation - Wikipedia https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUiqaFIONPQ ] It gives a great overview of the data collection movement and it’s issues and pretty damming real life consequences.

100% (well almost all I imagine) of these surveyors/data analysts thought they were getting real valuable data and could improve society and so on, for the Soviets it crushed their empire, for the rest of the West it has led to what we have now mass confusion.

So yes I do value data, I am no dinosaur and I firmly believe that this world is so complex, never mind human behaviour complexity, that I always take data collection with a great degree of scepticism.

So yes, it’s valuable and yes it’s also very dangerous as nobody with bad data knows it’s bad data. I have seen it many many times, even in MaidSafe.

I agree, things like, how folk feel about privacy, price of disk space, take-up of mobile versus desktop and much much more. That is all very valuable. Much of it satisfies a gut feel or general perception, sometimes it can actually do the opposite and that’s good (maybe better).

I can guarantee you that I am not :wink: However thinking any data is good is wrong, bad data is worse than having no data. What I am saying is there is a significant amount of bad data and data from surveys … well let’s look at experiences, the worlds best … election predictions! I am not ignoring experiences here I am highlighting actual recent and relevant experiences.

Again folks I am not saying data is bad I am saying probably most collected data is likely not telling us what we think. most != all, for the avoidance of doubt.

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Your experience and effort are valuable and I appreciate them very much. Please don’t be discouraged if some don’t recognise that.

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Aye. You got me tbh because I’m not personally experienced here but from everything I’ve seen Soton appears to be very competent in this arena and likely shares a similar POV as you but I think I just misunderstood your initial response and brushed it off as you saying it’s useless but you just meant take it with a grain of salt. Ultimately Maidsafe can decide how and to what degree it is informed by the data and Soton can provide transparency and the results. We’re all fighting the same fight but we’re trying to fight smarter than harder and we can all meet in the middle on that.

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Thank you, I really appreciate that. :smile:

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Wow, already 9 responses on the survey and it’s only been “soft” launched! Ok, here’s copy anyone can use (and adapt) to share the link to this survey across platforms (e.g. Twitter, Reddit, other community forums, etc.):

What matters most to you about dApp Platforms, Web3 & Decentralized Data Storage? Please take, retweet, & share this ~5 min survey! All participants can enter a drawing for Amazon gift cards & 1 winner will receive 1000 MAID! https://forms.gle/1JN7dGLuuGJG5Gag6

This survey will run until 11:59 PM GMT on Feb 28. All winners will be announced after the survey closes.

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Well written survey with control questions and such, good job.

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