Find your audience
Hey!
I've been inspired recently by @robfitz on helpful constraints and, particularly, picking an audience that you’d want to be friends with, so I thought I'd summarise the ideas here for other indie hackers going through the early stage idea/validation process.
Find who you want to help first
.. and then find their problems.
What makes a good customer segment, pre-idea?
- you care about them
- they spend money
- you can reach them
People you like
Pick an audience segment that you’d want to be friends with.
This connects you to them and their problems, which massively helps with customer development (i.e. chatting with them) and motivation.
People who spend
Your audience need money, the ability to spend, and to already be spending it.
If their budget comes from elsewhere, e.g. their boss, other teams or organisations, or they aren't spending it right now, each sale gets much more complex.
People you can find
You want to reach them via easy, simple methods, e.g. blogs, content etc.
If your contact channel needs extra layers, i.e. going via paid media, publicity, you increase complexity. This can become a moat, but increases risk and time to get there, so acknowledge and accept that up front.
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These three criteria intentionally restrict your problem search to an audience you want to help, which connects you to their problems, gives you focus and helps you deep dive beyond surface level issues because you do genuinely care.
I hope that helps! Thanks to Rob for his concise advice (worth following his new short (approx 1 min) video series on Youtube also, see links above).
I like your approach Matt, and is a strategical way to think about it.
In my experience, you also need to consider who you are. In that way growing an audience happens kind of naturally. Is a process of finding your place in the world and what your superskills are.
Absolutely agree with this! I think part of the challenge (and reward) of this is that it's not always easy to predict where your place is, and it can also change over your life.
For me, part of my journey has included starting out making short films many years ago, which turned into an idea for a type of motion based dance art (as i'm also a dancer), which then later combined with learning to code to get me interested in creative coding and the generative art world, which feels like a great fit for me creatively.
So I'm looking for problems to solve for this group, which i'm becoming part of (my startup is an attempt to do that, but hasn't worked in its current form). Whether I can make a sustainable business is another question, but it's a good place to start.
Thanks for sharing! I think that the most challenging part of finding your audience is to target the decision-makers or the "people who spend" like you mentioned. For example, we are mostly targeting tech leads but it's hard to distinguish them from all software engineers when it comes to PPC campaigns.
Thanks! Yes that's tricky, ideally you'd be able to validate that through chatting to them, even by directly asking who controls their budget, or if they need sign off, but PPC doesn't really allow for that.
How do you go about tackling the issue at the moment? Target by specific role titles, or e.g. role + company size + X to build up an approximation? Or just accept it as a cost of using that channel?
At the moment we created personas and we narrowed our targeting (professional experience, age, hierarchy position). We manage to get a 15% of tech leads but we try to reduce the cost per lead.
I didn't know about @robfitz videos.
Thanks for sharing, @Matt_M.
Glad it's useful, it seems to be a relatively new series (the very short vids only started this year), worth keeping an eye on though (as is everything Rob does).