The situation
Here’s the situation. You spent weeks, months, perhaps even years building your product. You were sure that the product just makes sense, and you intuitively knew that it was going to work. You may have spent money building this product—perhaps someone else’s money. Everything made sense, and you launched it.
Your launch may have gone a couple of ways. Either you launched to a crowd with great fanfare, and after using it for a bit, people fell off. Otherwise, you launched to nobody, and in a puff of silence your number of users just remained flatline.
Whatever you’re going through, could it be as bad as things are for this sad chimp?
Identify the problem
There could be a few reason why things went badly. According to an increasingly famous study by CB Insights, in an analysis of 101 startup postmortems it was found that the top reason for failure was (in big, bold, CAPS-LOCKED lettering) NO MARKET NEED. This is a reality that can be gnarly to come to terms with, particularly if you have a product that genuinely works great. Especially if you spent considerable resources on it. Some people would have me change the title of this article to “Why are my potential customers stupid?”
If that’s you, then scroll up to the sad chimp and take a good, hard look before scrolling back down here. Shame on you.
This article isn’t intended to be a doomsaying nightmare hell bent on ruining your dreams of starting a business. That being said, let me tell you a short story about a certain engineer that built a product for about a year without checking in with the market first. That engineer is yours truly, and what I built was a piece of SaaS that enabled everyone to build their own chatbots without technical skills required.
One of my “competitors”, Sayspring, had a product that did half of what my product could, and rather poorly to be frank. But in this world, they were acquired by Adobe, meanwhile all 40 or so of my initial users disappeared in a puff of silence.
Guess who’s back?
What happened? Well, I didn’t check in with the market before building the product first. In other words, I didn’t talk to any potential customers and figure out what they wanted.
All I had a product that did a thing. Sayspring had a product that specifically addressed a need.
This is a common problem
Take AskTina for example. According to a recent interview on Failory:
AskTina was a live video chat widget for experts to install on their blogs.
And why didn’t it work out?
We did not spend enough time validating the idea through customer interviews before investing in building the MVP.
This meant that with every day we spent building the tool we were increasing the likelihood of confirmation bias (this is the right thing to do because we are doing it), this ultimately lead us to spending too many resources on what was ultimately a poor business idea.
Customer interviews would help a lot in this situation. If the founders of AskTina simply reached out to their target market (people who contacted experts via email) and just checked in to see if they would be willing to pay for a voice chat with the customer, they wouldn’t have had to waste resources on building technology that was ultimately not worth much.
Have you checked in with your target market to see if they have any desire or need for your service?
Then there was IntroNet by Trajectify, a service for networking that was supposed to be better than LinkedIn. What happened to them?
The business didn’t succeed in the first two iterations of IntroNet for the same reason that 90% of tech startups fail: we did not find a product-market fit before the end of our cash. It’s a math equation that is pretty deterministic.
The Market is your new master
Silicon Valley is full of Sisyphuses. Don’t be a Sisyphus.
Hopefully you’re realizing by now that the market is something that you cannot tame like a wild stallion. The truth is, the market is something that you need to live in servitude to, and the only way you can do that is by knowing its needs. Even behemoths like Google or Facebook exist at the mercy of the market, and it does frequently destroy their products.
So how do you know the needs of the market? Ask the market. The market is just made up of human people. Even if you’re targeting businesses, you can still talk to the people that represent the interests of the business. You can do this by simply talking to your target customers, and there’s a whole book that tells you how to do just that, called Lean Customer Development.
These customer discussions are usually called interviews because they’re to-the-point (but still friendly!) and consist of pre-determined questions that are designed to get directly to key insights. You can track your customer interviews and get started with some example questions using our Customer Development Dashboard.
Is there hope for my product?
Possibly! You may just need to better define your target customer. One thing for certain is that it’s time to change your approach. If your an engineer, it’s time to stop approaching this the way you’re used to approaching problems–you want to add more features to the product. Stop.
Talk to your customers before going any further, and see if your product fits any of their needs, and then get their feedback on your product. You’ll learn the truth about your product through them.