Running a lean startup? You will find here a list of tools you can use during the customer discovery phase.

Survey and Feedback tools

Although people tend to think of Survey Monkey or Survey Gizmo when I mention Survey, I actually think that Google Forms is very good already, and it is free.

Google Forms

Simply go to http://docs.google.com and select “Create new” / “Form” and you will be presented with a very good form designer.

Once you have created your form, Google publishes it and gives you the link, or you can embed it into your own website.

The answers are saved in a spreadsheet. You can be notified each time someone completes the survey, and you can even redirect the user after completion of the survey thanks to a hack.

KissInsights

KissInsights is a new service from the creators of KissMetrics that allows you to display a non-intrusive but highly effective widget on your website or blog.

Depending on which page the user is in, you can choose to ask some specific questions to better understand your user.

UserVoice

You probably know UserVoice or GetSatisfaction that allows you to add a side tab in your pages where users can leave feedback and ask questions. I don’t recommend these services because they are simply inefficient and slow your pages down.

A/B testing

As Ash Maurya mentioned on his blog, depending on whether you are in the Customer Discovery phase or another one, you will be testing different things.

In the Customer Discovery phase, you want to test your unique value proposition (the main tag line on the homepage for example)

I have used the three following tools to A/B test CoachFire and TaskArmy:

Google Website Optimizer is a classic

You can run A/B tests at the page level (send 10% of my traffic to variation1 and the rest in variation2) or multivariate experiments at the page content level.

Visual Website Optimizer is a recent startup that simply rocks

You just have to add a javascript code in your pages and you won’t have to touch your website again each time to create a new A/B test. I found VWO very easy to use with their user friendly designer.

ABingo

If you are writing your application in Ruby on Rails, you can integrate more complex split tests straight from your code.

Analytics

You need to understand your customers/users better. What are they looking for in your website? which sources send better traffic?

I am slowly going away from Google Analytics in favour of Clicky (although this is an affiliate link, I genuinely recommend this tool).

Out of the box, Clicky gives you actionable metrics, rather than a awful lot of useless data.

For example, it allows you to drill down to a visitor level to understand better how the users coming from a specific source interact with your website:

Did I mention that Clicky is real time?

Although a lot of people refer toKissMetrics when someone asks for an analytics tool, I have never understood what value they add in comparison to the other analytics tool like Clicky and Google Analytics. KissMetrics is all about funnel conversion, which any web analytics tool already offers and having to add yet another script on your page isn’t justified by having pretty conversion graphs.

MixPanel is about tracking events and cohorts in your web application (in real time). Something that differentiates MixPanel from other solution is the ability to track server side events too. A perfect use case for MixPanel is tracking the engagement of the users in your Facebook social game.

You can find more tool ideas on the Startup Tools Wiki.

What tools do you use to better understand your customers?(when you are not outside the building interviewing them)