Dave Goldberg Quotes

Bobby and I went through some old questionnaires about customer requirements for languages, then we compiled a new one and sent it out to a few dozen people we knew.

In order to create predictive algorithms, you need to have a training set. So, that training set is created through our quantitative surveys. Those surveys need to include either basic market research questions or basic political polling questions, which might be added to get your opinion on a brand or an issue or a candidate.

The desire to collect information on customers is not new for Target or any other large retailer, of course. For decades, Target has collected vast amounts of data on every person who regularly walks into one of its stores.

I've never been in a focus-group meeting. I wonder how many anchors can say that.

Traditional market researchers are cold and calculating and scientific.

My job as a pollster is to understand what really matters.

I really like the mission at SurveyMonkey, which is, we help people make better decisions. It's just a great thing.

If you don't have women working for you, you really don't know what the people who are buying from you really want.

When you know who your customers are, that can give you an edge on the competition.

Forget 'branding' and 'positioning.' Once you understand customer behavior, everything else falls into place.

I don't have any focus groups on talent and programming. If I need five people in a mall to be paid $40 to tell me how to do my job, I shouldn't do my job.

How do people know what they want until we show them?

Our polling methodology has gotten outdated, and, in fact, it's not really telling us what it needs to be telling us.

Too many bar owners built a bar for themselves... when they should have built what their market and demographic demands!

We're guided by consumer data, and it helps give us the confidence to invest where the consumer is going.

Often, people think that individual data is the most valuable thing they can collect. But it's not useful to know what I am doing or where I am, unless you're particularly interested in me, which is weird. But it is very useful to know what a population of people are doing.

Using science to tell us what customers are looking for is second nature for us here.

Before any movie of yours gets made, it will be vetted by the studio's marketing department. So, you do have to answer the question: Who is your movie for?

Knowing your customer inside and out is mission-critical, and it takes time. It's impossible to hit on the insights that will ultimately decide your company's fate without putting them to the test - literally - even if that takes longer than you'd have liked.

After marketing surveys by Universal Studios indicated that 'Rocket Boys' as a movie title would not attract the female over-age-thirty demographic, the film was retitled and released as 'October Sky.'

Ayasdi's customers can finally learn the answers to questions that they didn't know to ask in the first place.

Ukip had undertaken a survey on why people wanted to leave the E.U. or not, and they also had membership data. So we were able to build personas out of that. That was work that would normally be paid for.

I've spent 10 years checking my analytics on my end to see what people were talking about and what they like.

The fact that used cars is our largest category is a good example. We would not have sat in a conference room and said, "Hey, how about used cars?" So what can be learned that is extensible to other companies is to ask what are your customers doing with your products that maybe you didn't anticipate that they would do? How do you think of your customers as your research and development lab, as opposed to having an R&D lab at headquarters?

... the thing we see wrong with YC apps most frequently, is that people have not thought about the market first and what people want first.