How to ask: the open-text field done right
The instrument is one form field, which makes the temptation to fiddle with it dangerous, because most of the ways founders 'improve' the field are the ways they ruin it. Get these four things right and the field does the rest.
Open text, never a dropdown. The single most important decision is to use a free-text field. A dropdown feels tidier and it is worse in every way that matters. It can only offer channels you already thought of, so it can never surface the named podcast or the specific community you would never have listed, the answers that carry all the signal. Worse, it actively corrupts the data: Ruler Analytics found that 47 percent of leads who picked the first dropdown option were inaccurately attributed. People satisfice. They click the first plausible thing to get to the next field. A dropdown does not measure how buyers found you, it measures which option you happened to list first.
Mandatory, and multi-line. Make the field required, and give it room. A multi-line free-text field signals that you actually want a sentence, not a word, and you will get richer answers for it. "A founder in my Slack group sent me your guide on X" is worth a hundred "Google" rows, and you only get it if the field invites it.
High-intent forms only. Do not bolt this onto every form on the site. Put it on high-intent forms only: the demo request, the strategy-call booking, the contact-sales form. The logic is friction economics. On a top-of-funnel newsletter signup, an extra required field costs you conversions you cannot afford. On a booking form, the buyer is already committed, already typing their calendar availability, and one more field costs almost nothing while returning data that can reshape your entire budget. The same friction discipline that protects your funnel metrics applies here.
No leading text, no example answers. Ask the plainest possible question and then get out of the way. "How did you hear about us?" with no helper text, no example answers, no "e.g. Google, LinkedIn, a friend". The moment you offer examples you bias the answer toward them, and you have rebuilt a dropdown in prose. The whole value of open text is that the buyer reaches for their own memory, in their own words. Let them.