How to optimize building products with Google forms
Credit Inc.com

How to optimize building products with Google forms

The fact that Building products is hard is probably something you are familiar with. But if you are not, try getting 100 users to use a digital product in a week without meeting them physically then you will start to understand.

Like many experts including those at YC, getting your first 100 users is the starting point to building out your market through customer acquisition. As an early stage, you are likely still raising your first check and you probably don't have skilled talent that can handle customer acquisition. The good news is that there are tools to help you get customers or users. Google forms is one of them.

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With Google Forms, you can collect and send out questionnaires, get the details of interested users and even track yours under signup demographics. The best part about Google form is that it not only allows you to create free forms, share edit access with your team, populate an excel sheet with form details, but it shows key metrics gotten from the participants filling the form. These metrics are however dependent on how you create the forms. Today's newsletter is about creating automation flows using Google forms.

There are several use cases for Google forms but for the purpose of early-stage startups I will focus on three key use cases;

1, Building an MVP

2, Collecting and analyzing user data

3, Managing recruitment

Founders are typically innovators with an assumption, a core assumption that their solution can be facilitated at scale for profit. To test the assumption in the market, the founder has to build an MVP. Building an MVP is the first step to the validation of the idea. If you have an assumption that business owners would make more sales if their companies were more visible for instance, you don’t want to build the software to make them more visible first because it may take a lot of time to build something innovative and it may end up not being used by a lot of businesses. A better approach would be to first build an MVP, test with 100 users and validate the core assumption that the software can actually help the businesses close more sales. Once the current users have positive testimonials from the MVP, then you can start to think of scaling the product.

According to Eric Ries in the “Lean Startup”; an MVP is that version of a new product (feature) that allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learnings about customers with the least effort.?

Using Google forms to build an MVP

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How then do you build an MVP with Google forms you may wonder? The key is to understand the concept of MVPs, once you do, possible use cases for Google Form may start to emerge. I recently spoke to 3 undergraduates at the University of Nigeria Law Faculty, they were building a clean water access solution to provide speedy clean water on demand to people living within and outside the school environs. They wanted to aggregate the water orders and deliver in bulk using vans instead of bikes or tricycles which typically can’t carry as much. In that scenario, they can actually create a google form customized with a price description flier showing the different quantities of water and their accompanying prices. The fields they can include in the form are as follows;

  • Name field (For properly identifying whose order is whose when delivering).
  • Phone number (So they can call the person to confirm delivery location).
  • Delivery location (So they can deliver the product)
  • Email (So they can send updates on discounts to the user) - Make optional though to reduce churn rate.
  • Quantity of water needed (Use a drop-down to indicate different litres of water).
  • Any other details (This can be special requests like whether the user has a leaking bucket and would appreciate additional support).
  • Payment options (Here the funder can put the business’s account and require the user to upload screenshot proof of payment. The founder can also include a link for automatic payment collection and confirmation using services like Paystack in Nigeria, Stripe in the US or Paygate in South Africa ).?

By sending out this form to be filed by potential users, the founder(s) is able to determine the following;

  • How many people need their services?
  • People's willingness to pay for their product and lastly;
  • The demand for the product, which can prove that it's solving a major problem.

The great news is that after the information is collected, Google forms allows you to populate a CSV containing the details of the people who filled the form, this can help you to see the following at a glance;

  • How many customers you have
  • The time of their request
  • Their distribution of customers by location
  • The proximity of their delivery locations to each other and
  • The total quantity of water requested in litres or gallons.


Remember that an MVP is the easiest way to validate your key assumptions about your customers. In that sense, with the right understanding of what you are trying to build you can use Google forms to start building your MVP as well.
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Using Google forms to analyze user data

While building the Flourish Opportunities Network (FON) Scholarship automated database, I first started by building a community of people interested in graduate school scholarships. In the process of building this community, I had to collect user data to understand the needs of the community in order to build my MVP around the most prominent challenges. Of course, I used Google forms.?

I asked them questions around the following;

  • Schools of Choice
  • Countries of Choice
  • Course of study
  • Class of degree
  • University of undergraduate studies
  • Work experience
  • Scholarships they had applied for
  • English test scores
  • Passport processing status and?
  • Subscription status of FON's YouTube channel

An exciting experiment I implemented was to put a drop-down menu on the subscription status with a simple "yes or no." I then wrote a prompt to do so in the same question field and included the channel subscription link (for more details on how to include a YouTube channel link that leads straight to a subscription prompt click here). Then in the next question, I asked again whether they had done it. What happened next was interesting. After I had gotten over 50 responses, I decided to check to see if my automation experiment worked. The Google form Analytics pie chart showed that the number of subscribed respondents increased by 300% after they saw the second prompt. The reasoning is that they had to go back to following the call to action because it was the last question before the submit button.?

From the responses I got, I was able to tell the following;

  • The different schools the respondents attended as undergraduates.
  • Their range of class of degrees
  • The experience level of the respondents
  • Average English Language Test score
  • The top country of choice
  • The top school of choice?
  • The distribution of courses
  • The amount of preparation needed?



GoogleGoogle forms have an excel sheet feature that populates the data collected on the excel sheet. This can help you analyze the data you have collected based on the data points you previously defined.?
        

At Surepayy my current startup we use Google forms to collect data from our Campus ambassadors who are engaging with business owners and onboarding them on our flagship platform; Sure Review. The form tells us which school's campus ambassadors onboarded the highest number of vendors with the Google form Analytics piechart.

Using Google forms for recruitment

When I and my team first thought of starting the Campus Ambassadors program we decided to use Google forms to manage the recruitment.?

We created the form by simply typing form.new on Google chrome. You should try it. The same thing applies to new Google docs. You can create one with doc.new.

When we created the form, we added the following fields to collect information from our applicants;

  • Name
  • Sex
  • University
  • The current class of degree
  • Leadership instances
  • Experience as an ambassador instances
  • Interests

We had over 40 applicants in less than three days. At a glance at the responses page, we could tell if we had more female applicants than male applicants. We could tell if we had more applicants from one school than all others, we could also tell the distribution of class of degrees.?

We successfully selected 4 from the four schools we chose for the recruitment process and have worked with them to onboard over 800 student business owners so far.?


Google forms are very handy and useful for every early-stage startup.
        

So, why use Google forms

1. It's user friendly, requires little or no tech skills to create and manage Google forms.

2. With Google forms, users can make reference to data collated from surveys in the future.

3. Google forms are linked to your Google Drive so it's easy to track them irrespective of how many you create with different accounts.?

I look forward to writing to you again soon.

Keep building,

Osita.



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