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Comment by GabrielF00 | Hacker News Reader

Unless I'm missing something here it looks like there were a total of 17 responses (8 yes 9 no). Are you really making a major business decision on a survey with an N of 17?

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This is a really good point, it was the first thing I noticed as well. 17 responses isn't even enough to throw a margin of error at, the entire survey is effectively a margin of error of 100%.

If it really was only 17 responses that's the equivalent of asking five people on the street if they like hot dogs and then deciding based on their answers to open up a laundromat in Brooklyn.

Once you add in a proper confidence interval, 17 responses on a yes/no question is enough to make decisions like this - as long as you know in advance what your target numbers are. The downside of the small sample is that your margin is going to be extremely large, of course.

Using Clopper-Pearson at95% confidence tells us that between 23.3% and 70.8% would answer yes to this question. I do agree that is probably still too broad to decide to kill a business, but if you know you wanted a 60%+ (for example) positive response from this audience to hen that sample is enough to cause some serious worry.

It's then breaking them down into subcategories. Look at the confidence interval on the posted charts: +/- 80% on the high income responses this survey was interested in. I.E. worthless.

Exactly. Furthermore - if you go to the link below, you appear to go straight through to his survey which now has over 400 responses. The results stil show a slight 'no' bias, but 59% of women in the $75k-$99k earnings bracket said yes they would.

http://www.google.com/insights/consumersurveys/view?survey=b...

Nice find.

There were only 2 responses from women earning $100-150k. A suburban woman answered 'No', an urban woman answered 'Yes'. The vast majority of the remaining surveys were filled in by women earning $25-49k, which isn't OP's target audience. However, most women earning <$75k answered 'Yes', so the market might be large enough after all. Maybe not for haute couture, but for reasonably good prêt-à-porter, sure.

it's also missing age.

i think the <20k are probably underage.

it's a catch22. when they are old enough to be their market, they are old enough to not want to mention age and body measurements.

> Methodology: Conducted by Google Consumer Surveys, March 26, 2013 - March 31, 2013 and based on 45 online responses. Sample: National adult Internet population.

When I was looking for a survey system, I looked into Google Consumer Surveys, but I couldn't set it up like I wanted to for my budget.

We found Survata, an Y Combinator company, they helped us a lot and overdelivered :) - our project is still on standby / awaiting money, but the results Survata gave us were top notch and gave us several insights. We were looking for a much better confidence interval, so we had a screening question.

http://survata.com/home/

We also thought of using Mechanical Turk, but it's the wrong place for Rewire Attire.

I've toyed with some notions for better fits :) , mostly based around getting measurements through photos (android, webcams, whatever), and systems for that appear every so often on the news :) .

Edit: I'm not related to Survata in any way, just a happy customer.

Only 3 of the 444 responses from women made over $100k. The chart in the article is only for women 18-24, 17 responses.

Looking at all 444 women regardless of income, 56% said yes, and their income chart is far more even. And in the next income range, $75-$99k, 59%, or 13 of 22, said they WOULD give their measurements. Fun tool to play with however :)

It starts at 10 cents a response I think, so at most he got 1000.

I do agree though if you're right, that is incredibly insignificant data.

The problem with statistics is that you'll always get an answer. Sometimes it's a garbage answer, but it'll be there...

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