How do I find a niche for my product?
How do I find a niche for my product?
My product allows our users to automagically share images with friends and family in the images. You can find it here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rebhu.shoot
I launched a barely functional beta version of the product. Now, I am improving the product for general availability. How do I find the right users to use the app?
Current scenario of sharing photos:
1: Everyone takes some photos
2: Someone creates a shared Dropbox/Google Drive link
3: Multiple people in a group upload the photos to this shared account
4: Now everyone downloads the photos
There is a lot of friction in 2 and 3.
What we do:
1: Take photos with our app
2: Select if you want to automagically share photos or not
3: Recipients open our app in their mobile device and receive the photos almost instantaneously (20 seconds to 1 minute, also depending on internet connection)
That is a good idea but Google Photos support that already.
Ideally, you would find the niche before building the product.
I started building because I saw a problem. Mid-way into the product development, I learned that I should have thought of users first.
In Google Photos you have to make the AI recognize a person's face. That means you will have to tag everyone in group photos at least once. With our pre-beta product, you can start sharing photos right from the moment you download the product.
You should not listen to me too much (or anyone else here :) )
And not because we can't give you valuable feedback but because we don't know your customers.
I have interviewed prospects before and I was very surprised how different their needs and priorities were than what I imagined they are before talking to them.
Sometimes, users can have completely different needs from our assumption
This business would not be protectable. If your features are better than what exists - companies like Google are already in this space with millions of users and will just add the features themselves. I would not go down this path.
WhatsApp/Instagram could have copied Snapchat stories a lot earlier but they couldn't as it required redesigning their existing infrastructure. It is good that competition exists. And 8hoot is not just an automagic photo-sharing product.
Our goal is to help people socialize in-person.
That sounds brilliant. For the company of girlfriends who make a bunch of photos, and then try to send everything. Or any event - wedding, corporate party, forum. We went to access the application and the photo you have. This should be like a file sharing service, but with the flaws of old ones.
You can share file too with our product but we are not focusing on that right now.
Company of girlfriends. Looks like I will have to find one. XDXD
Google+ has (had?) a feature where you could set up an event and invitees to the event had the option to add photos to the event. Perhaps you could leverage some events API. I don’t know if Facebook, Meet-up, Eventbrite, etc. have this.
We are developing the group feature like in Splitwise but our product works even without this.
In Google Photos you have to make the AI recognize a person's face. That means you will have to tag everyone in group photos at least once. With our pre-beta product, you can start sharing photos right from the moment you download the product
Parties is the best example I can find. Everytime we're having a party with friends, it's really tough to get the pictures afterwards.
Think New Year's eve, wedding etc : everybody take picture, but they never share them because of friction... and in the best case, they end up forgotten on a Facebook event page.
How to market it... I don't know, but there are probably some ways, and word of mouth could work quite well once the first users are onboard.
I will try and target party people. I built the product because I missed gathering all the photos from the farewell party at my Alma Mater.
The best use case scenario I can think of:
Group of friends get together and start a 8hoot session. They automagically keep getting photos clicked by their friends, till all of them end the session. Its basically the replacement of "Show me, show me" tendency after clicking a pic. Now users can check their phone to checkout the pic, instead of asking their friend to show the pic.
Now I'm not sure how you would target these kinda users, just thinking out loud. The scenario I described above can be a good niche to start off with.
Thanks. I will try to target people who exhibit such behavior in public places.