[wpietri]

Thanks!

I think Blank is entirely right. But you have to be tricky.

At my last company we did user test every Tuesday afternoon. When seeking subjects, we looked like a research firm, not a product company. When they arrived, there was no company name on the door. The interviewer would start out asking about a variety of products to get a baseline; ours would just be one of several discussed. Eventually, because we spent more time on our stuff, maybe half the people figured out that one product was ours, but by then we generally had enough honest opinion.