What market are you serving?
I enjoyed listening to @mijustin's recent Indie Hacker podcast. It gave me all the feels that he is seeing success in Transistor.
What he said about the market being there and ready for your product stood out for me and I thought it would be helpful to highlight this to indie hackers as something to give some serious thought about it before committing to a product.
What market are you serving? How is the market going to serve you? Will it make your life easier or harder? Is it really a growing market?
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This concept should be pretty much axiomatic.
If your developing a product - you should see a need or a demand in the market for a problem that is not being addressed effectively by anyone, thereby providing you with an opportunity to capitalize on that niche and in effect helping everyone involved (including yourself).
If that isn't your thought process to building and growing a business, I'd be very weary.
Agree that the demand should be visible (there should be proof that people are already taking action!)
But I don't think you need to find "a problem that is not being addressed effectively by anyone." Sometimes, when there is a lot of demand, you can still enter a market even when an existing provider is doing a pretty good job!
Examples:
I think what he's saying is that you'll make it a lot easier on yourself if it's an under-addressed problem, instead of a well-addressed problem where you need to stand out like 100x more just to get others to switch. Of course identifying an under-addressed problem and developing a much more superior solution is also hard in itself. Much easier to launch a "me too" product first, then somehow add a twist or iterate to something better/different.
Increasingly, I've been seeing that an under-addressed problem is actually harder.
Jason Cohen (WPengine) and I have been banging this drum over here:
https://justinjackson.ca/beach
Interesting. The other problem then becomes how to get others to switch. It's unlikely that as a new entrant with limited resources and zero audience, people would be motivated enough to switch. With existing players having years' of customer development learnings and also product momentum (as well as a way more complete feature set), meaningful differentiation is key but often not covered very well in startup/entrepreneurial literature. I think that also merits a post of its own: "how to sell ice-cream on a hot beach when your ice-cream just doesn't taste as good as your 10 neighboring competitors' yet."
We want solutions to problems we are already motivated to resolve.
We also understand new things by what we already know. AKA competitors.
New things are confusing. New things are scary. New things are not cool unless we trust you or you are really cool.
I used to hate thinking about competitors. I now realize they are everything because this is how people understand you. It's a frame of reference. It's context.
Our job is to position and differentiate in a way that we are understandable but also the obvious choice.
This is positioning.
So if your ice cream sucks (that's a different problem) but you might consider differentiating: Make it cheaper, offer a compelling dining area or experience, entertainment, provide exceptional service, or offer one of a kind flavors.
Certainly, you could drive some eyeballs by doing something wild like putting sushi on your ice cream, but this is so far out in left field people will have to put in so much mental effort to understand what the hell you were thinking that they'll stay clear.
I discussed that in this podcast interview:
With Zlappo (https://zlappo.com), I'm building a lightweight yet powerful social media scheduling and productivity tool.
What market are you serving?
Solopreneurs/wantrapreneurs, or what Rob Walling calls the B2A crowd (business-to-aspirational). These can be anyone from the Gumroad seller and blogger with affiliate products to the online coach and course seller.
How is the market going to serve you?
The more they use my product, they more they increase my brand visibility. There is some form of built-in virality to the product. Which means that if I can solve the problem of getting my product to be very sticky, I inadvertently solve the marketing problem as well.
Will it make your life easier or harder?
The market is accessible and aplenty. They're accessible and yet they think logically like a business without the high customer acquisition cost. They're often willing to invest in new products and software if it's able to get them the result they want. They're not stuck in old ways like legacy/niche industries.
Is it really a growing market?
As automation/globalization/immigration/what not displaces more and more jobs and causes job loss, more and more people will be forced to become entrepreneurs in a gig economy.
What market are you serving?
Small SaaS companies
How is the market going to serve you?
Founders and marketers in the SaaS space understand tech and the value it brings, they already sign up to other SaaS products so as long as my product is better than the competition they will buy, I won't have to convince them.
I created a dev tool, and that was a much harder sell. Developers are use to building stuff themselves and rarely buy products they don't need to buy. Developers will use open source software even if it is a lot worse for them and their bosses/clients.
Will it make your life easier or harder?
Life is much easier now :)
Is it really a growing market?
Yep. SaaS is growing very fast. The largest companies are growing 50%+ a year and smaller companies are created every day.
Companies are signing up to more SaaS products every year and spending more on the current products they're use.
I think folks misunderstand me when I say: "pick your market first."
❌ "Market" = "A group I'd like to sell to."
✅ "Market" = "A category where people are currently spending $."
For example, the global diamond market is currently $82 billion USD. That means consumers spent $82,000,000,000 on diamonds last year. That's an interesting market!
"Small SaaS companies" might not be a great market definition because it doesn't tell us anything about what they're buying.
The segment might be growing fast (meaning: there are more SaaS companies this year than last year), but that's only relevant if we know how they're spending their money:
❌ "There are 1.4 million potential customers in this market."
✅ "Last year, 1.4 million real estate agents spent a collective $131 million on digital signature software."
You can (and should!) target a customer type ("Small SaaS companies") but the next step is to figure out how they spend their money:
If you talk to 100 small SaaS companies and ask: "What apps do you spend money on?" they might respond with something like:
☝️ each of those could potentially be good markets!
With this in mind, it might make more sense to target a market this way:
✅ "I'm in the helpdesk market. Last year, small SaaS companies spent $10 million on helpdesk apps."