College Fest changed my life.....

I was in my final year of college completely clueless and

At one point, everyone has some idea to build or change something around us.

Even I had an Idea (btw I still have so many things to build)

I was in my final year of college completely clueless about what I would be doing after completing my degree this is common for everyone I believe and I’m not the only one who doubts their abilities.

But on the other hand, I was always excited to try something new and this excitement led me to figure out one thing that everyone in my college was missing very badly.

It was an intercollege fest

In the last 50 years of college existence, no general secretary could pull this off and I badly wanted to give a shot from my side.

But, I had no clue about 

• What is User Research 

• Primary & Secondary Research

• We also need to validate our ideas to see if there is any requirement.

All I knew was “I want to do this anyhow” 💪 and without giving it a thought I started working on it all alone without even thinking that I would need a team, would have to do 100s of other things to run this smoothly and I will not be able to do it all alone.

Little did I know that it’s important to “understand your users” if you want to create a product or service you are interested in because most of the time as founders, and product managers we think based on the assumption that we have or on our gut feeling.

But that’s now how things work…

When you want to build anything for people who are going to use your product or services you need to dig deeper into the minds of your users. 

You can’t build anything on ASSUMPTIONS or GUT FEELING. To do this better you need to understand your user's pain points, what they need, their behaviors and motivations. 

When I started working on College Fest as General Secretary there were multiple challenges from meeting everyone's expectations to getting the budget from college authorities and finding sponsorship and 100s of other things which initially I thought was easy

.

Unknowingly I started doing primary research (You might be thinking what the heck is this) but primary research is collecting data from your users or potential users which gives you first-hand information or Insights on user's expectations and behaviors.

I had to talk to users to understand (what were their expectations), in my case it was:

• College authorities Team members

• College students

• Sponsorships people

• And multiple other people whose support was needed to make this run smoothly.

The best way (methods) you can do this is to 

Talk to Customers: If you have direct access, nothing beats one-on-one conversations. In my case when I was talking to everyone to understand what they had in mind about the fest and how I could benefit them from my existing ideas I would have to tweak it according to the user's needs.

You can’t build any product or service without talking to users, this is the most fundamental thing you need to have if you want it to grow. Sometimes people have to say “Hey, I don’t know how to find my users” or “I don’t have access to them”. 

All you need is an Internet connection, a laptop or mobile and a social media account (everyone has one nowadays). Start sharing about it on socials (Ik Ik everyone has to say the same thing) but I’m sharing this from my personal experience.

When I started building Speech to Note in Nov 2023, I did not have any audience or users Instead I had to find them to talk with them and understand what they wanted and it worked for us because we focused on gathering Insights from the users and iterating on them.

Today we have Speech to Note has made sales of more than $50,000 yet we have not stopped talking to our community and users to understand that what we have built is something they are having fun using it or not.

 

The Point is even if you have sales or early ideas you will have to talk to users and there’s no escape from it.

I know I know you might be thinking bro what happened about your college fest? I was interested in it… but you gotta wait for it 😉

Since you now know about what the fu*k is Primary Research it’s also important for you to understand what secondary research is.

Secondary research means working on existing data that others have already collected. It helps you make better decision-making and provides insights without conducting new, original research.

When we started working on Speech to Note we reviewed so many reports on the speech recognition and transcription market and how it’s being used in products and this is just a small example. 

To give you more context about secondary research, we did thorough analyses of our competitors by studying their products, user reviews, and market strategies and that helped us understand what’s their strengths and weaknesses and what we need to improve on.

People complained about frustrations with slow transcription speeds with other tools, we understood that if we wanted to make it happen this was the first thing we needed to solve. 

These are just a few examples of how secondary research can help you and why both are important and interlinked with each other.

The best way to use primary and secondary research is to combine both of them and start working on your idea by using secondary research and then move to primary research.

Let’s say you have an Idea and you want to build a dollar company the first step you need to do is to find a competitor for your idea and start gathering existing data to understand the pain points of your users.

Now when you have an Idea of what you want to build and what’s already existing in the market and the pain points of your users start talking to your users about your Idea.

Use these insights to make informed decisions, iterate on your product, and continuously improve user engagement.

If you want to Understand How to talk to users, then you should read “Mom Test”

Building a successful product is an ongoing journey of learning and iteration. Keep exploring, keep asking questions, and never stop engaging with your users.

Stay curious and keep innovating!

Ps: Btw here is me performing in that fest