What they didn't know was that we used Greasemonkey to alter the Facebook page, inserting fake feed items using their real friends. (We told them at the end if they didn't figure it out.) Some people liked what we were doing, but a lot hated it. So many that it was clear we'd never get the market penetration we wanted.
My cofounder did a 5-minute video talk about it if you'd like more details. https://vimeo.com/24749599
As an aside, surveys are worse than useless for this. Look for things that let you understand live user reactions in circumstances that are as real as possible. Signups are a good metric, especially if they'll give you a credit card number up front. But if you can, always back the metric with live user tests and discussion with real users. If you're patient and ask good questions, you can learn a ton.
(i think from that video this is your market) it seems like influencer marketing is a thing now, though I might guess you were looking at more 1:1 not social media celebrity:many
what a fantastic quote!
A decade back I co-founded a startup. My cofounder, a brilliant product manager, had what seemed like a great idea. Great enough that he quickly got a fat check for the whole seed round. We could have just started building, but both of us were big fans of using user testing to guide product development, so we instead did a lot of user tests.
Six or eight weeks later, we were down at Sand Hill Road for our first board meeting. At this point, according to our VCs, normally they'd just hear about plans. But my co-founder got up and explained that of the 6 key assumptions in our product, 2 and maybe 3 were false. The thing they'd given us money to build was a bust. The room was very quiet. Then he went on to explain the next idea we'd come up with and got them excited about that.
Something we learned later is at the same time we'd raised a seed round, two other companies raised large A rounds to go after basically the same idea. They spent the next 18 months (and north of $10m) trying to make it work.
Not only did that make us feel a lot better about having pivoted, but it was an important lesson to me: the best failures are those with the smallest craters. We bought the same knowledge for less than 1% of the money spent.