Figuring out Lång’s target audience

Currently I’m running early tests for Lång – an app that helps people who don’t budget spend money confidently. (As I’ve said in previous posts, it’s Swedish and pronounced ’long’, which is also what it means.)

After that, I expect to iterate a bit on the target audience. Currently I’m trying to keep an open mind about this.

The broad target audience is in the one-sentence pitch above: people who don’t budget. I think there are many of those, but few product offerings – which I find a bit odd. Almost all products are based in some way on the idea of budgets: categories, tracking spending against those categories, pie charts.

Further narrowing down the target audience, on the one hand there are people for whom it’s a struggle to make their money last until next pay day – and on the other hand there are those who want to limit their spending for some reason.

Often you hear that you should define an extremely narrow target audience, and focus on that. I’m not sure how to approach this. Perhaps just come up with one and try it for a while, then move on to another one?

In a way, I have shaped the product for a narrow target audience through the decisions I’ve made about what the app does and how it does it. I’ve narrowed down the feature set as much as I have could. Maybe it makes sense to approach it as casting a wide net to figure out for whom this product is appealing, and figuring out why that is so – how they understand the product and how it could fit into their lives?

I hope to get a bit of clarity about how to proceed with this during early testing. So we’ll see.

If you want, you can follow along here.

(I wrote this as a reply to a comment on a previous post, but thought it worked as a stand-alone post. I hope this is OK.)