Did you read what I simply wrote? The lounge in Fukuoka was nice surprisingly, given that it’s a regional airport and this is a short, 2½ hour trip. There’s some good souvenir shopping in the terminal, including Royce chocolate-covered potato chips and all kinds of various Kit-Kats. I think we were the only Business Class passengers who had been actually excited about being aboard a Sanrio plane – most everybody else seemed to notice as a minor attention/annoyance.
The airline flight attendants seemed sincerely happy that we were enjoying it a lot. On both our Sanrio plane tickets they loaded us down with all types of fun swag to take home with us. Even the barf bags and the basic safety credit cards are custom! Service starts with sparkling wine and hot towels. As I pointed out in the intro, they serve Din Tai Fung onboard, so while there have been other options on the menu, I wasn’t going to choose them. I put the Taiwanese Beef Noodle Soup, and it was included with asparagus and crab in XO sauce, poultry marinated in Shaoxing wines, pickles, and steamed taro buns for dessert. My hubby opted for japan menu which was a lot like a bento package – a dozen little interesting seasonal things all on the plate. Both our foods were delicious… however, not “I’d gladly pay to consume this on the ground” tasty.
If you do not, put those metrics apart and look for better ones to track right now. Quantitative data is easy to understand. It’s the numbers we track and measure–for example, sports activities scores and movie ratings. When something is ranked, counted, or placed on a scale, it’s quantified. Quantitative data is technological and nice, and (presuming you decide to do the mathematics right) you can aggregate it, extrapolate it, and put it into a spreadsheet. Quantitative data doesn’t rest, although it can certainly be misinterpreted.
It’s also not enough for starting a business. To start out something, to find a problem worthy of resolving honestly, you will need qualitative insight. Qualitative data is untidy, subjective, and imprecise. It’s the stuff of interviews and debates. It’s hard to quantify. You can’t measure qualitative data easily. If quantitative data answers “what” and “how much,” qualitative data answers “why.” Quantitative data abhors feelings; qualitative data marinates in it.
When you first get started with an idea, supposing you’re following a core principles around Lean Startup, you’ll be looking for qualitative data through problem interviews. You’re talking with people–specifically, to people you think are customers in the right marketplace. You’re exploring. You’re getting from the building. Collecting good qualitative data will take preparation. You will need to ask specific questions without leading potential prospects or skewing their answers. You must avoid letting your excitement and fact distortion rub off on your interview subjects.
- Who helped you
- I. Mudayris, Friday Sermon, PA TV, 7 January 2005
- Life Coach
- The office at home is used as a place of business to meet or confer with clients
Unprepared interviews produce misleading or meaningless results. We cover how to interview people in Lean Analytics, but there were many others which have done in order well. Ash Maurya’s book Running Lean offers a great, prescriptive approach to interviewing. I recommend Laura Klein’s writing on the subject also. Sidebar: On paper Lean Analytics, we proposed the idea of scoring problem interviews. The essential concept is to consider the qualitative data you collect during interviews and codify it enough to offer (hopefully!) new insight in to the total results. The purpose of scoring problem interviews is to lessen your own bias and ensure a wholesome dose of intellectual honesty in your time and efforts.
Not everyone will abide by the approach, but I hope you’ll take a look and give it a try for yourself. I won’t spent a lot of time on vanity metrics, because I believe most people reading understand these OnStartups. As stated above, if you have a bit of data that can not be acted upon (you don’t understand how movement in the metric changes your behavior) then it’s a vanity metric and you should ignore it.