Avoid This Killer Trap
In my last project I created an app an that failed because it targeted the RIGHT people. Read that again: it failed because it targeted the RIGHT people!
Basically my pitch was: use my point-of-sale app to monitor your business remotely if you are are too busy to visit your shop/store. The trap? You needed to visit your shop/store at least once to set everything up before you could enjoy the app! Busy people were the right people for that app and I was offering them convenience. But the app went nowhere because they were too busy to try it!
Is your idea's greatest strength also its greatest weakness? Share your own experience in the comments below!
Maybe the problem you were trying to solve wasn't important enough?
People prioritize their time, because as you say they are busy. But if what you offer is of real value then they would have prioritized getting it set up.
It's a classic 'mom test' scenario, where people say yes to stuff, but in reality it's not that important.
Thanks for stopping by Rosie!
You are absolutely right, and the keyword there is ENOUGH. The problem I am solving IS important...but is it important ENOUGH? Apparently not. Let me share a story!
About 53% of my 200K Instagram followers are women between the ages of 25 and 35. Many of them are micro entrepreneurs and many of them are having babies.
One of them, lets call her Suzan, graduated from college and decided to open a clothing boutique rather than get employed. Suzan is awesome and she grew the business to $2,500+ per month in sales. Then she got pregnant (on purpose!) and the problems started.
As the months went on she was unable to take 12-hour bus rides across the country to go buy the latest fashionable items. Eventually Suzan's hubby asked her to take it easy and stay at home rather than go to her boutique to make sure customers were being well served.
To compensate for her absence and maintain her financial freedom, she relied on an employee to watch the shop. She lost visibility of daily sales because she couldn't be there every day to confirm whether they happened or not. She lost visibility of her stock/inventory and the shop eventually stagnated and she was forced to close it down.
Suzan lost a $2,500+ monthly income stream and became financially dependent on her hubby because she was unable to monitor her business closely. My app was designed to help her avoid that fate so when I launched it I targeted it to other women in Suzan's position.
The app was important...IS important, but not important enough as doing everything necessary to give birth to a healthy baby for example. I've had leads cancel appointments because they had clinical visits that took too long. Others ended demos abruptly when they began feeling nauseated. And I will never forget the one whose waters broke just as she was picking up her phone to go to the Play Store!
It's really hard to compete against "life" (the things people do and are kept busy by) and the biggest lesson I learned from all this was reducing adoption friction: to use my app you had to stop everything, get in a car, drive to your shop, close it, count all your stock/inventory, enter it all in the app and only THEN could you get value from it. Life intervened each time and most people never got to the end of that loooooong adoption process so the app failed!
I am sure that the people do visit their shops/stores or what are they too busy with.
If they are too busy not using your app, then how do you know that they are your users?
Just wondering..
Thanks for stopping by Timothy!
Indeed they do visit their shops, but as I discovered when I opened my own shop, that frequency is low...I was busy with work, so I needed my own app to monitor sales and inventory levels at my shop, but the app couldn't do any of that until I visited my shop to capture the product details...which I didn't do immediately because I was busy at work! See the catch-22 problem?
I knew that busy people were my target users because I did manage to get a few of them, but because they were so busy, it would take a person around 3 months before they finally said "OK, I gotta do this now otherwise I will never do it!".
That's a pretty long sales cycle for an app that costs just a few dollars a month and it ultimately made me give up on the whole point-of-sale app category after 10 years so I can try something new (I am exploring ideas around content sharing, after I did a lot of that on Instagram when marketing my apps and managed to get over 200K followers [see konvovo and mrproblemsolved pages].