How to plan & run effective focus groups

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I am excited to announce that on Thursday, May 15th Omar will talk to us about running effective focus groups and getting the most out of it. As some of you may remember we organized a focus group in March and Omar happened to be one of the attendees (the image above is from our March focus group). Later on, Omar shared some insights on how to run better focus groups and offered constructive criticism on our March focus group meetup. I found his advice very sound and helpful, and our focus group planning & running had improved hundred times since then. I thought that many of startup founders can benefit from Omar's experience, insights and sharp suggestions. Join us on Thursday at 7:30pm at MeetBCN (http://www.meetbcn.com/).

Here is a short blurb on our upcoming Thursday meetup:

You have an idea for a startup... you have a solution in mind... you have time and energy because you are excited... but will the rest of the world care about it? If so, what problem would you be really solving? How? For whom? How will you find them and let them know about your product? Why will they change their current habits and use it? Will anyone pay for it so you can actually have a business?

These are some of the key questions startup founders should explore in as much depth as possible before they start actually building something. In this session, we will quickly review the Lean Startup principles and analyze the different customer development techniques, with a special emphasis on focus groups and in-depth interviews with potential users. We will then delve on how founders can design and implement such individual/group customer discovery discussions in order to get the most out of them and validate their problem-solution hypotheses.

This session will be conducted in English by Omar Perez, a marketing pro and startup founder, who loves customer development as much as he fears it, because he has learned the hard way that, as Steve Blank said, no business plan survives first contact with customers.

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The founder and manager of MeetBCN has offered us their meeting room for this meetup (I checked the space and it is awesome!). The capacity is for 16-18 people. Thus, if you are not planning to attend or decide not to come at the last moment, change your RSVP accordingly.

Thank you!