Ask IH: Where to look for your target audience?
In pursuit of making sure my initial MVP solves a real problem for my potential customers (and is not just based my gut feel), I went around various forums, sub-reddits, slack groups, communities asking specific problem-solution questions.
Unfortunately, most of these communities appeared lacking real conversations and are only filled with posts just self promoting the latest new site, product, landing page, blog entry, etc.
That leads me to this Q:
If there's a problem that you are trying to tackle with a certain solution - and if you want to validate your understanding of the problem-solution by asking your target audience:
- where/ how would you look for your target audience?
- how would you approach reaching your target audience so that they respond?
I'm trying to validate my problem-solution fit understanding for online marketing - conversion optimization - analytics area (if that helps)
This seems like the obvious thing to do - and that's the problem.
Pretty much everybody hits these forums doing a one-time self-promotion fly-by - never to be heard from again.
People can smell this and they don't respond to it.
You need to map what you do in the digital world to what you do in the real world.
You wouldn't just go up to a group of strangers and be like "Oh hai! Check out my startup!" now would you? (I really hope you wouldn't.)
What you do is you engage in conversation.
You feel them out.
And - and only when - the opportunity presents itself (or if you're good at social skills, you've steered the conversation to where you want it to go) do you go for the ask.
And when you go for the ask, you really just want to throw it out there as an idea.
Like, "What do you all think about this? It seems to me that this is something that would be a real pain - is it?"
That's how you do forums. You have to hang out for a while and let people get to know you. You need to contribute to the conversation.
Now, let's use that real world example again.
Let's say you need some answers to something.
What do you do?
You don't walk up to a group of strangers and ask them something.
You find someone that you think might be able to help you and you approach them - humbly - telling them about your situation and asking them what their thoughts are.
Developers want things to be one-step processes and they want them to be straight-forward and to the point (I can say this - I am a dev).
What you need to know is that behind every forum, behind every email, behind every interaction you have online - there is another person on the other line.
What you need to do to be more effective is to visualize that person on the other line as if you were in the coffee shop with them.
How would you approach them?
What would you say?
Map it to real life and I think you'll see how to get what you're looking for.
Oh. One more thing. Some forums are full of people that are not "real" people. They're just cruising through and are non-committed. This is like a bar full of chodes vs. a club that has a specific clientele.
My advice?
Pass on the chodes and find the place that has real people in it.
One last tip: Sometimes forums feel "safe" since they're "easy". (That's why everyone does them.) Fight that urge. Find people's emails and email them directly. One on one in "private" is often far more effective than one to many in "public".
Hope this helps.
Best of luck.
Thanks. Makes a lot of sense.
I've struggled to find a single forum that seems like having real people. I have just started with looking for people's real emails and asking them individually. It seems even that requires gradual conversation building.
And yes - "Developers want things to be one-step processes and they want them to be straight-forward and to the point"
This is so very true! :)
Think of forums like bars.
It's a little immature and juvenile, but then again so are people.
There are some bars where people just pop in and say "Hey, anyone want to chug some beers!" If you're selling beers, this is a good place to be.
There are other bars where people are very stand-offish at first. They're sitting at the bar reading a book, but are really looking for an in-depth conversation. You can engage these.
Then there are other bars where people come in en masse and just want to get crunk. Since they're hell-bent on one thing and one thing only, unless you can appeal to that, you might be SOL.
And then there's some places where the people have a huge "fuck off" tattooed on their foreheads if you're not "one of them". Stay away from these unless you are in fact one of them.
The trick is to figure out what kind of crowd you're dealing with and then to play along accordingly.
Yea, well, I seem to be hitting a lot of bars where everyone wants to do nothing but just sell their beer! So, I guess I'll have to look elsewhere (reach folks via email, their blogs, etc)
I would do that but I would also keep an eye out for "new bars" you just aren't in the know about yet.
Here's an example.
You know Shopify?
They have help forums where people using Shopify go to ask questions about Shopify and e-commerce related things.
Since a lot of these people are first-time e-commerce store owners, they're usually pretty exacerbated that their stores aren't just taking off due to 1) unrealistic expectations and 2) inexperience.
Picture this like the bar where people come to complain about being lonely or about their bad relationships - the people are hurting for something good.
If you're able to jump into the conversation and give them some pointers and make them feel better about themselves, people will be so thankful it will blow you away - because nobody else is taking the time to give a shit about them or hear their sorrows.
This goes a long way, and you can start to develop relationships with people in this way.
Maybe they'll become customers of yours, and maybe they won't.
That's not the point.
The point is that you're able to engage in meaningful conversation with people who have a problem and you're able to hear them out and maybe offer some relevant advice.
And once you've done enough of that and people get a sense of who you are, then feel free to ask them to help you out.
That's how you forum.
Don't ask for anything - just help.
People come to forums looking for answers, looking for help, or looking for some direction.
Try and be the guy that does just that.
And keep an eye out for forums that exhibit this quality - they're out there.
Interesting. Must say, the example helped. Thanks!
Take a look at step-by-step guide to define target audience - https://www.cleveroad.com/blog/how-to-define-target-audience-using-the-best-modern-analytics-tools#how-to-find-target-audience-
Okay, here's my actual response ;-)
First, I wouldn't build a new product without a specific customer in mind to begin with. Yes, lots of people succeed without doing this, by constantly adjusting both their product and their target market until they align, but imo it's much easier to keep one side of that equation (the market) fixed.
I also wouldn't pick a target market that I don't understand well. I made IH for entrepreneurial developers, because I know for certain that I can reach this audience in large numbers via Hacker News, Twitter, Medium, etc.
As for validating my idea, I think that would depend on my product. For a content site like Indie Hackers, I'd write a small amount of content as an MVP and see if people like it. Content can spread rapidly on the web, so after a few weeks of attempts, it's easy to tell if you're on the right track or not.
For a product that I actually want to sell, however, I firmly believe that you can't market something if you can't do one-on-one sales, so I'd start with sales. Specifically, I'd locate individuals who I believe to be my customer and try to get them to buy my product. If they resisted, then I'd make a note of why and consider modifying my product accordingly.
I'd also take the opportunity (this should be a phone call, not a text chat or email) to ask them about where they hang out online, where they get their news, where they hear about new products for the industry, who else I could talk to, etc. But ideally I would know all this stuff in advance, because I picked a market that I was familiar with!
One good example to learn from:
Tyler Tringas from Storemapper knew that his product would be used by store owners, and that store owners are not programmers. So he went to job marketplaces, found store owners who were looking for programmers to build them a store locator, and said, "Hey, I can build it for you, but why not buy my off-the-shelf solution instead?" Pure sales here.
Thanks.
I agree that I'm trying to pick a market that I'm unfamiliar with and thus the over-all question of where to look for them. So, I should either pick a market I'm familiar with or spend more time and energy getting familiar with the market I want to get into - by one-on-one conversations to begin with and by hanging around right places for longer and just interacting, understanding problem space, etc before getting into my thing.
@geekybiz: Will take some time to give you my own answer to your question tomorrow probably, but in the meantime you should log out of the forum and log back in so you can add your email address to your account. That way you'll get email notifications when people reply :-D
Sure, logged out and logged back in. Looking forward to your inputs.
Thanks!
Complete this exercise http://c.ymcdn.com/sites/www.msae.com/resource/resmgr/imported/Buyers-Matrix.pdf
Thanks! This questionnaire looks interesting - seems to help think more from your audience's perspective. Will spend time completing it.
The Trap 'Em & Hug 'Em Technique:
Maybe try meetups/talks/conferences to talk to people face to face? They should be less likely to promote themselves offline.
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Sure. Here's a very high level idea:
We all know website performance (speed) negatively impacts conversions (bounce rates, session lengths, conversion rates). I intend to work on a product that helps marketers (CRO guys) measure, correlate, track perf + conversions.
Now, there's a lot of features I can go about developing in this problem space but what I'm trying to do right now is talk to online marketers / CROs to understand what specific niche would be biggest pain area for them in this problem space.
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This is an awesome reply that touches very valid points - have pondered upon some in past while need to think hard about others.
Fundamentally, I'm trying to correlate technical metrics with business ones. My initial informal research suggests marketing guys would hold the cheque book so I'm essentially trying to go around marketing fellas and try get their answer to Q #1 and #2
My challenge, as of now, has been that I have not been able to find adequate places / approach to converse with marketing guys to get some idea on Q #1 and #2.
(I'm myself not a marketing guy but I'm a techie who's worked in performance area for long so I do know products in this area and have followed this space for years - but all that from a technical perspective)