Two Birds, One Stone

In September, a short article made the rounds in the twitterverse. It described an entrepreneur’s use of Amazon’s mechanical turk to “crowdsource” some of her market research.

For $27.50 she was able to survey 200 people and generate some validation about her business idea (to help you with the math that works out to approx. $0.14 per respondent). Great idea! Let’s do it! ….. Wait. I live in Canada, and we sometimes seem to get the raw end of the deal when it comes to technology availability (Hulu and 1st Gen iPhone come to mind). This “embargo” also exists for mechanical turk. I.e, Canadians can opt to complete crowdsource tasks, but we are not permitted to create our own tasks for others to complete. So as a Canadian, I am unable to create a survey on MTurk. There are ways around this (using a US mailing address, or a broker service - which seem to be of questionable quality) but they all seem a bit underhanded. So what are our options? You could use a panel service, where you will get pre-screened respondents that match your target demographic. For example, iTracks.com specializes in Canadian consumers with their CanadaTalkNow.ca service. The cost for their panels are around $3.50 per completed survey with a minimum of $500. A bit on the pricey side for a startup or a student. However, I expect that the quality of answers will be quite high. I ended up using a crowd sourcing service called MicroWorkers.com. It functions similarly to mechanical turk allowing you to create all sorts of tasks for people to do. I created my task asking people to fill out my 12 question survey (less than 4 min to complete) and offered $0.30 per respondent. After two weeks in the system, I had 1 response. After increasing the pay to $0.55 per respondent I now average about 1 response every day. Not exactly the performance I was hoping for, but I’m not in a huge hurry so I will just let it run its course. I’m quite confident that I would be able to generate 50 responses over two weeks if I bumped the pay to $1 per response. In looking at the other tasks posted to the MicroWorkers.com website (riddled with tasks like “retweet this” or “write a review about this” or “like this page on facebook”) it seems as the quality of my responses may be suspect. As a precaution, I’ve identified these responses in my survey software so I can segment them appropriately. An interesting service that I am watching is AskYourTargetMarket.com which is a crowd sourcing services geared specifically to market research. Again, the respondents are strictly US based but they do plan to add other countries in the future. (The also offer a pro-bono service to non-profits). In short, crowdsourcing your market research is approaching “utility” like prices (if you live in the US) but quality can start to become a concern. Despite the quality, it can be a cheap way to validate a few ideas.