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.
Very interesting story.
Not to steal the thunder, but I've got a pretty good story to related to this, but the opposite: I have never built a product for anyone, but myself. If I used the product everyday myself: than I'd know the product inside and out, I'd be able to find all the bugs in the system that everyone else was getting instead of me trying to figure out where I messed up. I'm experiencing those same issues and I'm fixing it!
Other than a few free projects, I needed money to keep it going, so I learned how to monetize products and turn them into SaaS -- but I've recently begun to dive into pay-as-you-go systems -- while I can still use them myself. I figure: if I have a need for it and I build it for myself, and then release it to the world: maybe others will have a use for it too. If not, I'm not disappointed nor did I fail at anything. It's an awesome product to me because I need it!
In 2015, I released my first web app, https://mypost.io, and today it is nearing 9,000 posts and I think about 500 of them belong to me. MyPost.io is a platform that helps you get web pages on the Internet in as little as a minute. I never marketed it. I never advertised it. I mentioned it a few times on Twitter and it seems to have gone viral.
I created it because I wanted a place I could easily go to, without having to sign up for an account, or having to give some type of personal information to wherever. I wanted a place where I could be anonymous and nothing identified me, where I could write some HTML and CSS easily .. or just write a plain old text story, and share it with friends and family.
Since its creation, MyPost.io has landed in Russia, China, Brazil, South America, South Africa, Philippines, Australia, and pretty much all around the world. Dozens of languages are typed on MyPost.io. MyPost.io is used by people of all ages and backgrounds. Businesses have begun to see its use: quick thing to put up where the URL is your custom URL.
Thing is.. I use MyPost.io everyday. It's a useful tool that I built with user-friendliness in mind. If others see the use for it eventually, than that's awesome. This is how I build my products. If others see the use, good for you, help me keep supporting it by paying what it costs me to keep it running, plus a little fee that I can keep for myself to stay healthy so I can keep writing that code. The best market is always first, and foremost, yourself; after that: find the ones who need it as much as you do and are willing to support you to keep doing what you're doing.
Hi, thanks for sharing your story. But I have a feeling you are kind of wrong.
People know what they need. They just don’t know what it looks like.
Absolutely. People are aware of their wants, but don't know how it looks. I should've articulated this better in the article (it's pretty much the same message in the book I linked, Lean Customer Development)
I agree with you - there are lot of examples with products or services that human were not aware of or didn`t see their use and/or value on the initial phase.
Marketing activities with education and storytelling to bring more and more attention is the key to success.