Ask IH: how to find a problem for your solution?
http://gridualism.com
Ask IH: how to find a problem for your solution?
Hey all,
like many other makers I created a solution without investigating the problem first: gridualism.com. Without knowing any better I spent a lot of time on developing it without investigating the problem or talking to potential users first. So naturally there are almost 0 users.
Before I throw the whole thing away, I'd like to take a step back and find out if there might be a market need for such a system.
Does anyone here have any ideas about who the potential user is and how do I find them?
What steps should I take to find out if there's a market demand (even if it's very niche) for a website like this?
Any advice will be highly appreciated! Thank you!
agree with some answers that it's better to vet your product with users before building, but also think that that is a probability-of-success measure vs a hard and fast rule, and trying a few things before you shelve it sounds like a great plan, at least for some period of time.
especially in a case like this, at a glance it looks like a powerful tool that could spark many use-cases.
maybe look at how Airtable does marketing as inspiration. Airtable is a super powerful tool but they don't sell it by showcasing its power because people mostly wouldn't connect the dots, they advertise by selling solutions to discrete problems people have and use ad campaigns with custom landings for each of those problems (org charts, cap tables, real estate stuff, etc..).
why would someone reference Euro data across countries, who does that, and how much time and pain is it for them to find, aggregate and visualize it. my hunch is they don't start by googling "cross reference euro data for XYZ". it maybe good to figure out those archetypes, explore and start reaching out. maybe offer a manual service that leverages the tech you've built to help them until patterns emerge. people aggregating this type of data could easily be spending plenty of money/time on consultants, data services, reporting tools, etc..
if you can build relationships and revenue off your services, automate, adjust, and narrow in what works.
thanks for the reply, it's really helpful. Love the insight about airtable marketing!
This is how I'm going to proceed: for starters I'm going to find people who deal with such data on linkedin and try get in touch with them. I'll start with people from eurostat, maybe try and find out who their most demanding users are.
Also I'll google for media articles that quote 'source: eurostat' and see if their authors would like to have better visualizations.
Then I'll work on nice and relevant visualizations and try to get some inbound marketing.
np. awesome, good luck!
Don't be too hard on yourself, sometimes it's good to build something because you are just curious about it, but obviously don't expect that they'll just come after you build it :D. I always liked this kind of tools (used Gapminder a bunch of times in discussions with friends) but not sure who would pay for it.
Do you know https://ourworldindata.org/ ? I ended up there a few times because of their great content and it's a model you could investigate.
A good way to increase traffic could be creating your own content, posting in https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/, and maybe even trying to answer questions in Quora with links or screenshots to your charts.
It seems ourworldindata.org is a non-profit, but they got accepted into ycombinator! Perhaps I should try and get in touch with them.
The lack of (for-profit) competition for such a service indicates to me that there's no strong market need. It just doesn't seem to be 'a big pain' for anyone. Lesson here: profitable competitors indicate an existing market, and that's a good thing.
The only possible subscriber for such service I could think of is journalists/publications who want to publish more data visualizations and charts.
P.S. Good point about building stuff out of curiosity and managing expectations!
Indeed, having competitors is a good excuse to get into a market! I am thinking on maybe instead of visualizing, going for the automated discovery of insights. There is a lot of datasets and it must be boring to check them one by one. Maybe automatically giving insights on the datasets that have biggest changes on a specific KPI could be useful for someone.
I often find this "ask people what they want" to be be a flip comment. There are lots and lots of attempts to query potential users but they either don't concentrate where you need them or have no idea what they require. Hence the Steve Jobs move to create what would change the world.
I agree, it's a lot more complicated that just "ask people what they want".
First, you have to know which people to ask questions (that's my problem, I don't know who my user is).
Second, you have to know how to listen to people. They might not know what they want, but they might know what problems they have.
“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” --Henry Ford. So in this case the user's problem is 'speed of movement', but the solution the user wants is 'faster horses'.
Unfortunately you've done everything backwards. You must start by figuring out what people want (not start from what you're able/want to build), and then build that (taking into account the constraints that you face). Asking what people "could" do with what you've built is an exercise in planned disappointment.
Yep, this is what I'm saying in my post :)
The question is what to do next and how to do it.
There are two ways: 1) Start over. Figure out something people want and that you can build. Build it. Don't try to save this one, it's just a sunk cost.