Thrasio’s consumer research-led product designs — Justin Chen // PickFu

As a CMO, what if you could get validation for your product before the launch? How much easier would your job be if you could validate which direction you're going to take to make sure it's a product that has a competitive edge and a product that consumers want without spending a couple of hundred grand? Listen to Justin Chen, Co-founder of PickFu, as he discusses how brands like Thrasio are doing excellent, budget-friendly consumer research-led product design.

About the speaker

Justin Chen

PickFu

Justin Chen is Co-founder at PickFu

Part 1How Conor McGregor used customer research to win mobile gaming — Justin Chen // PickFu
Part 2 Thrasio’s consumer research-led product designs — Justin Chen // PickFu

Show Notes

01:15

How did PickFu start?

It started as a side hustle for two engineers looking for a way to get human feedback for their website redesign. Now, it's a product used by book publishers, designers, gaming companies, and e-commerce brands.
02:48

How PickFu get feedback on marketing campaigns

They have a pool of 10 million people in the US alone giving feedback.
03:32

Why and how Thrasio is doing consumer research

They wanted to revitalize and rebrand a performing brand on Amazon and need to do a product redesign. PcikFu offered a sandbox of consumers to determine which design will perform best.
06:22

Getting marketing involved in product design

Testing marketing materials can often open a can of worms including product design not being a good fit. It's hard to drop everything to spend six months retooling the product, but what they will do is bring marketing into the next product creation or rebrand.
07:53

How CMOs should be thinking about marketing

The creative vision for marketing needs to be involved from the product side as well,
10:55

What kind of testing can you do with PickFu?

If you're working on a campaign, and you have a couple of iteration variations that you want to get feedback on, pop them into PickFU, and grab a coffee, it'll be done in a matter of minutes.

Quotes

"PickFu taps into the same enterprise market research panels that Procter and Gamble would use. But what we do is build our own layer of audience targeting and data quality on top of that. In the US, we're able to tap into over 10 million people, and then we are in a few other international companies and countries, as well as Canada, the UK, Australia, and Germany, adding a few more this year." - Justin Chen
"Thrasio is one of the pioneers in the Amazon space, buying up a lot of brands and turning them into household names. And one of their marquee brands was Angry Orange, which is a pet odor neutralizer. That was like a mom-and-pop Amazon product. And it wasn't great-looking, but it performed well. Thrasio came in and bought it, looking to revitalize it, rebrand it, and accelerate sales." - Justin Chen
"What's nice is that since we're not testing on live ads, we're testing in this kind of private sandbox that has the pay If we have a platform, you can test things that may not even exist; you could test products that are just hypothetical 3D renders just to see how you're going to compete against your competitors." - Justin Chen
"The creative vision for marketing needs to be involved from the product side as well, right? Because what is it that we're selling? Like? How do we want to sell it? What is it that we're selling and how do we want to sell it? needs to be conceptualized from the very beginning." - Justin Chen
"We see a lot of people testing how they're going to sell a product, even before they even build a product using PickFu. And so even before deciding to go into a new product line, we will see people create 3D renders and create the marketing imagery that they plan to use even before contracting with their manufacturer to even build it. Because if it's not even going to perform in the marketplace, why are you even going after it?" - Justin Chen
"The more that product and marketing get involved from the very early stage, it's a game changer for any kind of brand." - Justin Chen