Who's your target user? The more specific the better.
Too many indie hackers are building products without understanding who their customer is, so let's put it to the test.
Who is your target user?
Be as specific as possible.
Aspects you might include:
- industry
- consumer/pro-sumer/business user
- the value they get from your product
- other similar products they use
- geographical location
- primary language
...you get the idea.
I would think a lot more about "jobs to be done". What problem are you solving?
Especially with SaaS they could be anyone from anywhere.
I agree. A lot of these details might be useful for paid acquisition, PR, etc. But I prefer focusing on the problem that I am solving.
Our early adopters (as opposed to later) have the following attributes:
Curious how you found about these qualities. Did you interview the users? Or maybe just observed their company/linkedin/etc.?
We did both interviews and observing LinkedIn and also we are developers ourselves. However the early adopter thing is a monkey wrench and our familiarity with it is mostly from reading other's early stories - Slack, Stripe etc.
This is really good. Follow up question, how will you reach potential users who fit this description?
Figuring out who has an early adopter risk profile isn't easy. Some suggest checking the sales of other early non-competing startups. It's going to have to be direct sales to a large extent but early adoption is so huge an effort that patterns are hard to predict.
I'm building a search engine - aquila[.]network, starting on bookmarks organization before even thinking about organizing the world's information :D
My product will have 2 types of customers:
So, I'm optimizing all my efforts to target these curators right now. And I'm specifically targeting dissident content creators (bloggers, newsletters, etc. who don't have much of an advantage on organic search) who are far better at having 1000 fans.
I completely agree with this! But I think it goes even further than that. The problem is, even a poorly-thought-out idea can come up with the bullet points you mention above.
It's not that IHers don't have an idea of who their target user is, it's that they haven't identified the shared characteristic or pain point that makes them want to buy a product.
Take for example my first SaaS, CoderNotes. I could give you all those bullet points, but it doesn't mean anything, because I didn't identify the characteristic that would make people want to buy.
In my head, I could tell you that the product was great for teams, but we never had a whole team sign up. What I couldn't have done was tell you the shared trait that would make teams want to buy that software.
Compare that to Software Ideas, where we have a clear shared trait - founders and teams that are actively looking for their next software idea.
Having that clear filter does way more for us than knowing about other products, industry, etc. It's not about who they are, it's about what they want.
We have customers that are software agencies, angel investors, and of course other founders. The thing that they all share is that they are actively looking for opportunities in the software space.
I'd challenge everyone to look for that trait or characteristic in their own company, as opposed to focusing on demographics or regions. It's more of a Jobs-to-be-Done mindset, and it's worked well for us!