16. How To Use PickFu Polls in your Product Business

Today on Product, Packaging, & Profit I’m chatting with Justin Chen.

Justin Chen is the co-founder of PickFu, a polling platform anyone can use to get fast, reliable feedback from real people. Justin built PickFu with co-founder and college classmate John Li to use in their first business venture. People and businesses worldwide now rely on PickFu to help them make better data-driven decisions, faster. He has a BS in electrical engineering and computer science from UC Berkeley and an MS in engineering management from Santa Clara University. A firm believer in remote work, Justin braves Los Angeles traffic daily to shuttle his kids between school and activities.

Things you won’t want to miss from our chat

• What are customer insights and how they can benefit your business

• Where Justin got the idea of PickFu polls

• How to run a PickFu poll to get insights on your packaging design

• Why using customer insights reduces risk in your business

Hello and welcome to Product Packaging and Profit, where we help product-based businesses turn packaging design into a competitive edge to attract customers, grow sales, and boost profits.

I'm Kelley Kempel, After 20 years of designing packaging for national retailers, I founded Hidden Path Creative, a graphic design studio that supports entrepreneurs with branding and packaging to get their products seen and sold. I'm sharing the secrets that launched big brands so your products can stand out.  Let's get started.

Intro

Today, I’m chatting with Justin Chen, the co-founder of PickFu.

PickFu is a polling platform anyone can use to get fast, reliable feedback from real people. Justin built PickFu with co-founder and college classmate John Li to use in their first business venture. People and businesses worldwide now rely on PickFu to help them make better data-driven decisions, faster. He has a BS in electrical engineering and computer science from UC Berkeley and an MS in engineering management from Santa Clara University. A firm believer in remote work, Justin braves Los Angeles traffic daily to shuttle his kids between school and activities.

Now, let’s get started.

Episode Transcript

Kelley:

Hi, Justin. Welcome to product packaging and profit. I am so excited to have you on the show today.

Justin Chen

Hey Kelly. Yeah. Thanks for having me.

Kelley

So awesome. So I love for you to introduce yourself to the audience. Tell them a little bit about yourself and Maybe a little bit about PickFu.

Justin Chen

Sure. So my name is Justin. I live in Los Angeles. I co founded a company called Pickfu and it's a business that gives you really rapid consumer feedback on kind of anything you want. My partner and I built it years ago as a side project because we were working on a redesigned for a website we were doing and we wanted real consumer feedback on the designs that we were doing.

Being engineers. So we decided, well, we don't see a solution, so let's build it. And that's where PICFU came from. Along the way we've found we've seen customers use it in a lot of interesting ways. One of the ways is for a lot of product owners to be testing packaging and the marketing kind of anything around product design or, or, you know, how you're going to sell it to your customers.

Kelley

That, that's so awesome. I love that, like, there wasn't a solution out there, so you built it. And getting, I think sometimes it can be hard to get real customer feedback, like a lot of times As small business owners, product business owners, we share things with like our friends and family, but they may not necessarily be our customers.

So is it good feedback? So having access to a tool like yours where like you get actual customer feedback is so amazing.

Justin Chen

and that was kind of the same situation we were in. And as entrepreneurs, we were constantly asking our friends and family for feedback. And, you know, they, they kind of give you some useful feedback at first, but then they just start saying like, Oh, whatever you think is best. And like, you're so smart, and like, you're going to do well.

And then. Then it doesn't do well. And so they're clearly not your target audience, most of the case. And so it's, it's better just to get out of your head and actually talk to strangers. A lot of people recommend going to a coffee shop or going somewhere that where you can talk to people, but that's not only time-consuming and hard but also still may not be your target audience, right?

So you still need to find a way to be able to target, you know, moms with dogs or something like that, right?

Kelley

Okay. So for our listeners who have never used PICFU before, can you give us kind of like the quick and easy layman's version of like, how PICKFU works?

Justin Chen

sure. So at its core, it's a very simple one-question survey. So as simple as which product would you buy and you could upload one to eight different design variations. And you choose the audience. So it might be 50 you know, just first come first served us general audience, or maybe you want to say tea drinkers to own dogs or something like that.

And what's going to happen is we're going to go out and we're going to find those people and we're going to pay them to respond to this question. So not only are they going to choose which one they like, but they're going to give written explanations and demographic information. And that all happens within a matter of 30 minutes to an hour.

So it's super fast. And basically all these strangers are going to chime in on, on your designs and give you honest feedback because they're, they're trying to do a good job. They're, they're being paid and they don't, they won't get paid if you know, they write gibberish. So we, we spent a lot of time making sure that the data quality is high and that we're curating people who are actually trying to do a good job.

Kelley

Oh, that is fantastic. And I didn't realize that it happened so fast.

Justin Chen

Yes, very, very fast.

Kelley

To have that kind of feedback in 30 minutes is just, it's just so awesome. Especially when you're trying to make decisions very quickly.

Justin Chen

I mean, what we'll usually see is we'll see designers or people sitting down with their designers actually

iterating throughout the day on, you know, whatever, whatever it is. So whether it's packaging or marketing copy or marketing creatives, they'll see the feedback, they'll read through it, see, oh, people don't like this green or people don't like this font or whatever it is.

Make the adjustment run it again and just keep iterating.

Kelley

Oh, very cool. Very cool. Okay. So, is there like, you said that you can put in up to eight. Options, which is a lot of variations at something. Do you see that there's kind of like an optimal amount of options to give somebody to choose because I do know that there's like the consumer research that like the more choices you give somebody, the more difficult it is for somebody to make a decision.

Justin Chen

I don't know if there is. So the way ours works is if you're presented for with multiple options, two or more options. First of all, we randomize them. And then we ask them to rank every single one. So they do spend a little bit more time kind of analyzing how they would preferentially order them. And I think that process and then having to write you know, the written feedback allows for a lot of opportunity to do some analysis.

I would say most commonly, we would see 3 to 4 options.

I do think at 8 is kind of a more extreme thing, and we'll see that more with larger companies where they're. They do have a lot of different variations. I would say most people are trying to just tweak you know, a few different things on, you know maybe three different color variations or something like that.

But yeah, so what, what happens is because we ask everyone to rank it, we do a I think it's called an instant runoff. Kind of like the, what a lot of areas are doing for the elections, right? So, because you're, you're ranking first, second, third and fourth place what you're able to do is If one does not get the majority of votes, you're able to take the second place preference of those of those votes and then move them to like the next one, if that makes sense.

Kelley

so like if you have three people, and the third one loses, you're going to, you're going to kind of reject all those third place votes, well you're going to take their second place votes and then you're going to move them into like the different buckets.

got it. So if like, so if you surveyed 100 people and eight and you know, let's say 90 of them picked between A and B, but 10 of them picked C. C goes away and you take those 10 votes and like whatever their next choice was out of A and B, you give it away.

Justin Chen

And that's how we're pretty much always able to provide a winner even amongst eight options, because typically with eight options, if everyone just voted evenly, then you're not going to have anything useful, right?

Kelley

And I told Justin before the call that an agency that I have a relationship with, Mindful Goods, also uses PicBoo for image testing for Amazon. And I'm always really interested in the comments. That come back because you're saying, you know, everybody that votes also to give their analysis and I just always find it.

And I don't know if any of your other clients do I find it so fascinating, like what people say what they like. And I always think that you can find some, you can learn something by finding those common points that people talk about. Is that something that you see as well.

Justine Chen

Yeah. So kind of extracting the themes from what people are saying, right? Because especially if you're getting 50, 100, 200 responses, there's a lot of. A lot of interesting open ended feedback, really hard for you to interpret. So I think in the past, and I know that when we talked to Daniela from Mindful Goods about this, she used to go through and kind of like manually code it.

So like keeping track of like, all right, this one's talking about the color, this one's talking about the font, and super tedious. What's nice now is that we've incorporated AI into our results so that it can help you do that. And so we'll generate a executive summary, kind of already pulling out some of the themes.

But we also have a way to chat GPT style, ask questions of your poll results to then kind of extrapolate like, Hey, okay, well, can you write up give me the top five bullets, you know based off what everyone said. Or, you know, rewrites that marketing copy or something like that. So it's a, it's a really interesting way to kind of combine that human human feedback with AI analysis and AI summary.

Kelley

That is, that is such an amazing way to use AI with this as well. And I think that that's, that's so smart. I had no idea that you guys have added that. That's fantastic.

Justin Chen

I mean, definitely the, the, that qualitative feedback is, is where all the gems are. I mean, it's sure. It's interesting to see what might win, but you really want to know why. And that's where all that written feedback comes in.

Kelley

So what types of specific applications can product businesses use this for? So we talked a little bit about like somebody could put their packaging design on here. You can put your Amazon main image on here to split test things. But what other types, how are, how are your clients, what types of marketing are your clients using to, to get feedback in BigBoo?

Justin Chen

It really is anything up and down that whole product life cycle. So even in the very beginning, when they're trying to design or source the product, they're testing out different concepts or maybe different designs from different manufacturers. So they might be testing that kind of stuff. Definitely we've seen even texts for idea validation.

So perhaps you're trying to sell something to those tea drinkers and you want to ask them. Hey, do you ever have a problem with this? Would a solution like this be interesting and how much would you pay for it? And maybe you're just given a verbal description of what you're thinking about selling. And so that's just allowing you to get some open ended feedback about, Hey, don't forget to include this, or I've always had this issue, right?

So really early, really early stage and packaging for sure. Product design. I think the most interesting application across all of them is to make sure that you test against your competition as well. And I don't think that's obvious. But what we see a lot of our advanced customers do is. Not only do they iterate on their own variations, which you should do, but then you take what you think is the best version of it.

And then you have it compete against maybe your top three competitors, like whether you sell on Amazon or whatever marketplace. Then you're really understanding, okay, like here's why everyone else is choosing that one, even though the price is different or whatever it is, right? Like that's in the end, at the end of the day, you're in a marketplace and you're trying to compete with other people.

So just optimizing by yourself in your kind of your own vacuum is not enough. You have to compare it.

Kelley

Right. Okay. I, I really want to kind of reiterate that point because that I think is. That's so huge that like, so first you're, so first you are getting data on your own options, the poll. And then once you've gotten to your winner, your, your design, whether it's your, your package design, your product image, and you're like, okay, this is, this is my best option.

This is the one that people are choosing, doing another poll that is your chosen design up against your top three competitors.

Kelley

That's, it's so smart. It takes a lot of the risk out, right? Yeah, because I can't tell you how many times I talked to clients that we're doing packaging and design and it's like, okay, how's it, how's it going to, how's it going to work?

How's it going to look in store? And I always, at the beginning of the project, pull the, what the top competitors look like so we can pat the design up against them because we want to it. We wanna beat 'em . But this actually gives you that data before you've gone to print, before you've loaded something on a website and, and tells you, yes, somebody's gonna pick this over that.

Well.

Justin Chen

It definitely de-risks it. I mean, especially if you're selling in a marketplace, you just want to get that click. And if you now you're confident that whether your main image or your product design is going to get the click when competing against those guys, then your, your listing has a fighting chance of converting.

Obviously, your product still needs to be good, but it's that first click that matters the most.

Kelley

Right. And you're so right. Yeah. Like having a great product that's like the table stakes. Like you absolutely have to meet that. We all, yeah, we all know that. I hope all the listeners know

Justin Chen

But yeah, I mean, we'll, we'll even have customers that will go so far as to as they're doing product selection. Cause we all have a ton of different ideas for what we could sell or, or build they'll, they'll build out the product and the main image to the point where, okay, I, if I were to go to market hypothetically.

Here's what I would be. Here's the main image I would use. And maybe it's like the title and the price and everything. And only if they win against the competition in this kind of head, you know match up against three others. Well, they then decide to start investing in, in the actual product and then actually making the packaging and then like, so now they're able to do all these hypothetical tests and then only take the ones that, Oh, cool.

We're actually going to do really well here. And of course we've already done all the numbers and analysis and, you know, all those other things. But now we know that the design that we're going to bring to market and maybe how we're going to market it is going to do well, sure. It took a little bit of money up front, but how much money did we save by not investing thousands of dollars into a product that's not going to do well.

Or the opportunity cost of not going after something that was even better.

Kelley

Right, right. Well, that makes so much sense. And, and the fact that you're doing this online, that you're doing this so fast. I come from a retail background where, you know, 10, 15 years ago, if you wanted to get this type of consumer feedback, you had to put together a focus group and people in and guide them through questions.

And there was so much like, there were so many human touch points that could influence the conversation and the feedback that It, it wasn't always worth it for like the amount of time, energy, money, whereas this is, it's very instantaneous. So like, what did, what type of like time and financial investment to some, does a business need to put into running people's.

Justin Chen

Sure. So it's all pay as you go. So there's no subscription needed. It starts at a dollar per response. So we can go as low as 15 responses would be 15 with like us general. If you want it to do some more targeting or more responses, or say you want it to do eight options versus two, like this, it scales up a little bit.

So I would say on average, a. Amazon e commerce seller would be doing like 70 to a hundred dollars per poll, because they'd probably be doing 50 responses with like prime subscriber targeting or something like that. And then, you know, we do recommend iterating. So like, if you want to budget like a few, a few hundred dollars for like any kind of major decision so that you get iterate a few different times.

Kelley

I mean, that's still a pretty it's still a pretty low investment in comparison to you know, finding those people spending that spending that time and money or spending, I don't know, like 1, 000 to do a full print run of packaging. First line. But to get that information up front. So I think that that's a really like it's a really smart investment to spend a couple 100 to get that type of

Justin Chen

I mean, one of the most common stories we hear is that a lot of people know us for main image feedback, which is great, and you should do it. But what ends up happening is they'll do the test and they'll read through the feedback. And a lot of times the feedback is about the branding. The product name, the packaging, the product itself, and, all they would, all they wanted was feedback on the main image, but like, that's not what the issue was, right?

The, issue was they didn't gather any feedback early enough in the process. And now, like, people can't get past it because the rest is just so bad and like, they don't know what to do about it.

Kelley

So we should start using this earlier. We should use this around the product. Yes, we should use this around the packaging design and which I just think like, and I think it's this is getting the right kind of feedback, right? We talked about this earlier. It's not getting like your friends and family.

Right. Not getting the random person on the street that isn't interested in buying your product. It's, it's getting that targeting. How do you, how do you find those people to take these PickFu polls?

Justin Chen

So we tap into the same enterprise market research panels that a Procter and Gamble would use. So all these, I mean, you, you were in retail before, but all these CPG companies, they have a consumer insights team. They work with market research consultants. They tap into these panels and. It's a complicated process for not only programming the survey, but also cleaning the data and doing all the analysis.

So, we're trying to package it into a much more DIY, simpler way. We have our own layer of data quality and audience targeting built on top of all of those. To make sure that what actually comes down to you is already filtered to be high quality responses. And you don't have to worry about programming, like 20 different questions and getting the wording right and all that kind of stuff.

So we'll have prebuilt questions if you want to use them, or you can ask your own. I'm just trying to make it a lot easier so that anyone who doesn't have this kind of expertise can gather consumer feedback.

Kelley

Oh, that's so, that's so great. So it's, it's quality, quality insights because we're working with like the same, same pools of people. But it's just much easier. I love that you have pre written questions for things. How much kind of like upfront information or like what types of questions are good for people to include in their polls?

Justin Chen

So you wouldn't add too much more than just the question. And you can add context if you want, so. If you wanted to upload some text or an image as context to say, you know, all right, here's the product we're working on which logo do you like? And then you could have a few different logo variations.

So that's probably the most that you would ever need to do. We try to keep it pretty simple.

Kelley

Okay. Okay. That makes sense. Oh man, this, this is going to be, I think for a lot of these the product business owners that listen, I think this is going to be a real game changer in terms of getting really good market insights, because I think I'll kind of struggle with like, where do we go to get them? You know, their Facebook, do we go, when we go ask where,

Kelley

So I think this is just, this is so, so fantastic, like another great tool to add to box.

Justin Chen

definitely. Yeah. I mean, I hope it just helps people de risk their investments. And a lot of times it's, it's even as simple as color variations. You know, sometimes you're ordering. You know, a bunch of different umbrellas or whatever it is, but what colors am I going to do? Like, it's, it sounds like a good idea to do all of them.

Probably not. Right. Like they're not going to sell it the same, the same rate. So even just getting feedback on that, and then even using the feedback to kind of, you know, do the ratios of what colors you're going to order would be helpful so that you're not sitting on all this unsold inventory. So a lot of different ways that you could use that, that data to just be more informed about everything that you're doing.

Kelley

Fantastic. All right. And I am going to ask you the question that I ask everybody that comes on the podcast, which is what is the last product that you bought because of the packaging?

Okay. So I've been thinking about this. The last one that caught my eye because the packaging, I don't know if you know, moon cheese,

Justine Chen

like it's basically baked cheddar or whatever cheese you want. And so it was in Costco that I remember seeing it. And it's a, it's like a very bright orange bag. And it just says moon cheese.

And so like, it just looks like cheddar, like it looks like a bag of cheddar. so that's the last one that caught my eye. I was going to try to bring one, but I already ate them all. So I don't even have any left in the house. So that's yeah, that's, that's the one.

Kelley

Oh, that's that's great. Yeah, like color is so important in packaging. And in design, because one of the first things that we see and we remember it a lot. And that's it's And it's super interesting that you think the packaging itself looks like cheese, and then that is why you were attracted to it, but that just means they've got like some smart packaging

Justin Chen

Yeah. I mean, I love it when the package, the color, like you said, is, is almost all of it. Right. It's just an immersive as opposed to just an accent.

Kelley

Right. Yeah. And especially like in those smack aisles, there's so much going on that like having something unique, which I know that like Mooncheese's design is pretty unique, a little bubbly, which is not the typical fan area definitely helps it to stand out. Okay. So Justin, where can everybody sign up for their, their first pick food poll and start getting feedback on their products and their packaging?

Justin Chen

Yeah. So if they just go to pick food. com, so P I C K F U. com we're going to include a code in the video to give you 50% off your first poll. It's free to sign up. So definitely just go create an account. You can poke around and then just pay as you go. If you ever need help, we've got a very helpful customer success team that can chat with you on live chat or hop on a strategy call.

So that's how you can get access to BigFood. If you want to connect with me, you can find me on LinkedIn.

Kelley

Perfect. Awesome. Thank you so much, Justin, for joining us and helping us understand how we can get some really great insights for our product and packaging today.

Justin Chen

Yeah, definitely. Thanks, Kelly.

Thank you.

Kelley

If you’re ready to get started using PickFu polls in your product business, use the code HPC to get 50% off your first poll. I can’t wait to hear what insights you gather.

“Thank you for listening to Product, Packaging, and Profit, a podcast for product entrepreneurs looking to level up with packaging. We hope you’ll join us next time to hear more about how packaging can help propel profitable product businesses.

“If you enjoyed the show, please rate and review us wherever you’re listening—and be sure to come back for our next episode. Until then, this is Kelley Kempel of Hidden Path Creative,

And don’t forget: What’s on the outside matters too!

In Closing

Thank you for listening to Product Packaging and Profit, a podcast for product entrepreneurs looking to level up with packaging. We hope you'll join us next time to hear more about how packaging can help propel profitable product businesses. If you enjoy the show, please rate and review us wherever you're listening, and be sure to come back for our next episode.

Until then, this is Kelley Kempel of Hidden Path Creative, and don't forget what's on the outside matters too.