[This is a 47hats Tip.]

Today’s microISV tip is use an online survey to find out what your customers and readers want. It used to be in the bad old days P.I. (pre-Interent) that even small companies would spend thousands of dollars trying to find out what their customers wanted.

Now, you can simply ask them.

Taking my own advice, I’d like your help understanding what people want to read here at 47hats.com and what services of mine you might hypothetically be interested in.

Please take just a couple of minutes to answer my micro 4-question survey here: Click Here to take survey

I will not in any way market or contact you if you take this survey unless you ask me to contact you and supply an email for that sole purpose. Not not, not a month from now, never.

I’d just like to get a better idea of which kinds of posts here do you want more or less of and which of the services I’m considering offering might, in theory, interest you. No obligation, no marketing - just a promise to listen very carefully to what YOU have to say.

A couple of comments re doing this kind of customer survey:

• Go with SurveyMonkey.com or a similar service - they are dirt easy to use and dirt cheap.
• Keep your questions to an absolute minimum. My survey has 4 four questions, although 2 of those questions have multiple items to rank.
• Promise confidentiality and no marketing and mean it. Make clear you are looking for honest - brutally honest - feedback, not doing one of those pseudo-surveys large companies force you to go through to register products you paid for. To reinterate: No personal information - ip address, email address, name - is going to be collected during this survey unless you want me to contact you and no one but me will see the results of this survey.

In today’s world, your customers and readers have a say in what you create, sell and publish - or at least they ought to! Make it easy for them to have their say without fear of being marketed to.