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Find Your Core Users First

CHARLES HUDSON: Startups ultimately succeed by building products and services that really fulfill known or unknown customer needs. Prior to a prototype, you can validate that you’re attacking a broad problem worth solving, but you can’t really validate that your specific solution will be the winner.

There are two questions you need to ask yourself as an entrepreneur before building a prototype. First, how are people currently solving the problem? Do customers have “hacks” that they’re using to get around the limitations of current solutions? For example, prior to cloud-storage solutions like Box and Dropbox, people emailed themselves files and carried thumb drives to have universal access to important files across multiple devices. Customer “hacks” that involve using other products in ways that were not intended can indicate potential for a new solution.

Second, how close to you are the audience whose problem you’re trying to solve? If you are the customer, or very close to the target audience you’re looking to target, you can rely on some of your intuition to determine what you should build for a first version. Being a part of the audience you’re trying to target can help you generate some good hypotheses about what the market might want.

Once you have a prototype, the most important thing to do is to screen for intensity of usage. All startups begin as small companies, so there’s usually more useful information to be gained by finding targeted pockets of users who find your solution indispensable than finding a large number of people for whom the product or service is somewhat beneficial. Understanding why those targeted pockets of users find your product useful often gets to the core of why your product is valuable and can help move you toward building something even more customers will want to use.

All big things start out small. So the best way to find out why people find your product useful is to either ask them directly or make it really easy for them to send you feedback. One easy thing to do, assuming you’re targeting consumers, is to monitor Twitter and Facebook and see what users are saying about your product, competitive products, or the problem you’re targeting. That can be done for free or on the cheap.

WSJ

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