Business

Startups, businesses, and entrepreneurs use PickFu to test everything from business ideas, names, and logos to marketing copy and website designs.

Avoiding Groupthink in Your Work

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avoiding-groupthink

When you’re building a business, it’s easy to get bogged down in minutiae, jargon, and tunnel vision. You start assuming that everyone understands your product or service as well as you and your team members do. Of course, this is rarely the case. When consciously avoiding groupthink, how can you and your colleagues break out of your own bubble and address an old problem with a new perspective? What methods can you rely on to get feedback and understand your customers’ pain points and desires?

I spoke with several entrepreneurs who offered the following advice. … Continue reading

4 Top Tips to Test Your Business Name on PickFu

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There are many reasons to test your business name, but this might be the most compelling: names can influence destiny. Studies have linked a person’s first name with chosen career, company rank, even juvenile delinquency. For instance, one study claimed that if you are a woman with a gender-neutral name like Cameron, you may be more likely to succeed in a legal career. There’s even a fancy term for it: nominative determinism.

In business, shorter names are usually more memorable and distinctive than long ones. And, as one blogger observed, IPOs may be more likely with a name under 13 characters. A name that begins towards the start of the alphabet might place you towards the top in local or online lists.

Your business name can be evocative of the kinds of client you serve, your company mission, or what makes your business unique. No matter what imagery your company name is associated with, however, one thing is certain: your name is your calling card.

It’s no wonder Fortune 500 companies spend millions of dollars on studies and consultants when it comes time to name a business. But you don’t need millions to run a successful test. Follow these four tips and you’ll be well on your way to a winning business name. … Continue reading

3 Top Tips to Test Your Logo on PickFu

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One of the most popular uses for PickFu is to run preference tests on logo designs. If you’re in the process of creating a logo, learn from these past polls and make your tests the best they can be.

1. Decide how much you want to reveal.

Your question is the heart of your PickFu poll, the basic information to which respondents react. When testing a logo, you should consider what, if anything, to tell them about your business or service. … Continue reading

Testing Marketing Messages on PickFu (by testing marketing messages FOR PickFu)

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Clay Ostrom is the co-founder of a consultancy called Map & Fire which helps brands develop Lean Strategy. He was introduced to PickFu in a Medium article by Mike Fishbein, who we’ve also featured here on the PickFu Blog.

Taking Mike’s advice, Clay used PickFu to test two titles for a Medium article he was writing. He wanted to see which title and illustration had more click appeal. … Continue reading

Know Your Audience: How Smart Demographic Targeting Yields Better Insights

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Exactly who likes your product or design should never be a mystery to you. Knowing your audience means understanding their needs and desires, and knowing how best to address them.

On PickFu, you always know who answers your polls – each result includes a demographic breakdown of gender, age, income, ethnicity, and education level. But you can also target certain demographic groups so that only certain subsets of the population respond to your poll. … Continue reading

PickFu: A key tool in helping you “Launch Tomorrow”

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Recently, a new customer signed up for PickFu and told us he’d discovered our service in a book. That book was Launch Tomorrow: The Non-Designer’s Guide to Using a Landing Page to Launch a Lean Startup, by Luke Szyrmer.

In it, Szyrmer outlines a method for defining an audience, validating an idea, and quickly taking that idea to market. PickFu is featured as a means of rapid market testing “in order to figure out which concepts grab attention, tickle tastebuds, and leave people wanting more.”

“The implications of PickFu,” he writes, “are enormous… If you can find out how people react to a certain color or shape or logo or byline, you have a much better chance of choosing something attractive.” … Continue reading

10 Ways to Put Copy Testing to Work for You

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An attractive photo, a great layout, a memorable logo or app icon – these elements are often touted as the keys to optimization. Indeed, a well-converting site, ebook, or app will need them all. But sometimes we tend to underplay or altogether overlook the importance of copy testing – and to our peril. Whether it’s description copy of an e-commerce product, the subhead of a new book, or the elevator pitch of a growing startup, words matter.

Recently, PickFu increased the number of characters you can include in your test text block to 1,000. That’s the equivalent of roughly 200-250 words. Here are some great ways to use this feature for copy testing to improve your business: … Continue reading

When 99designs Is a Few Too Many

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99designs is a great site for startups and small businesses – for just a few hundred dollars, you can launch a design contest for a logo, WordPress template, PowerPoint deck, signage, and more. Graphic designers around the world compete to win, you provide feedback, and after seven days, you pick a winner.

Here at PickFu, we crowdsourced our own logo using 99designs. Once the contest began, however, something became clear: even though receiving over 350 designs was valuable from a cost perspective, choosing a winner among them all was beyond overwhelming.

“We’re programmers, not designers,” said Justin Chen, PickFu co-founder. “Other than my own visceral reaction, it was hard to judge the value of all the colors, typefaces, and icons.” … Continue reading