Who Are My Potential Users and Customers? The Process of Figuring That Out

In the entrepreneur world, a survey is considered primary research. Surveys are a good way for a person to gauge if a problem is important, the number of people who may face this problem, and their characteristics.

When should an entrepreneur conduct primary research? Well, the first-best time is always. The second-best time is right after coming up with a great idea or identifying a solution to a problem, according to the Business Model Canvas (a framework I’ve previously talked about).

On the Business Model Canvas there’s a section titled “Customer Segment.” Just like the title suggests, here we segment — or divide — customers into groups.

For my passion project, a basketball stat tracking app, I could segment potential customers into: players, fans, parents, coaches, recruiters, and reporters.

But if that seems like a lot of segments… that’s because it is.

To narrow it further, I want to identify a commonality that ties some of those groups together. There are multiple ways to approach this, but I am going to focus on the “jobs to be done” strategy.

What does that mean? In short, why would people use this app? I assume people would use this app to get two things (a.k.a jobs) done: 1) record stats, and 2) analyze stats.

So, my early assumption is to segment my market into two groups:

1. People who want to take stats (parents, coaches)

2. People who want to analyze stats (players, fans, recruiters and reporters)

It’s not the cleanest separation; there might be some overlap (for example, a parent of a youth athlete may take the stats themselves so they can analyze them later). But the needs are distinct enough that there are two clear groups that would use the app in different ways.

Now that I’ve segmented my potential customers, it’s time to conduct primary research.

If you identify with either customer segment, please take this short survey.

What’s next? Well, after I get a good number of survey respondents, I will move to the next section on the Business Model Canvas: the Unique Value Proposition. Here, I will have to conduct more research to quantify what will make this app different from the ones currently out there and the ones yet to come.