How many gold mines?

Where to get product advice?

…

From your customers.

Why is that? Because they’re the ones that will live with the consequences of your decisions.

They are gold mines of advice.

This is Anand Sanwal’s tip #2 of 100 here (speaking of gold, how about tip #1?).

It’s a good tip. But how many gold mines of advice do you need? Consider the following:

• 30. In Statistics, a sample size of 30 is a rule of thumb when research concerns people. Of course, that’s just a made-up heuristic and can be adjusted according to context.
• 11. Drip founder Rob Walling got a constant stream of advice from 11 paying beta customers over a 5-month period before officially launching Drip. This number is no more or less scientific than 30 – and definitely worked fine for Drip.
• 5. In UX research, Jakob Nielsen’s “five-user” rule says you only need to talk to five people; again, that’s made up but it appears to work well for Nielsen.

The throughline here is we’re going on gut; do you think 5-30 is a reasonable range in which to do so?