Marketing first.
For building a great product, a general advice is to try to find a problem that many people have and solve that. The business will make itself.
But what if you are not the kind who thinks about creative solutions to problems? Should you give up on the dream of being a successful entrepreneur?
I say, no. I will not be fazed by anyone telling me what needs to be done for success. On the contrary, I believe the people telling these things are dreamers. And very few dreamers are visionaries, the rest are either delusional or outright bullshitters.
When you say you want to try to solve a problem for someone, you think about your demographic, the emotion to target in them, your ideal customer, and how common your ideal customer is.
Which team in your company thinks in that direction?
The market research team! They always should be the first ones out learning about your customer’s behaviour, helping you frame a product and its features that fulfils the needs of a common enough customer type.
They should help you make design and UX decisions based on the numbers and intuition they have gathered over the years.
When we think of marketing, we think of cheesy ads and discounts, we do not think of the leg work going behind knowing how to sell a product. Why not think of it in terms of the research, both in knowing the market and targeting the behaviour?
What if we stopped trying to sell a product and focused on making a product that sells?
Simple and cheap marketing campaigns and market research surveys can tell you so much more than a mere guess.
But hubris often gets the better of us. Founders often tend to believe they know which problems to solve. What they call “vision”, I call lame. It relies on unquantifiable data point of a single person to make too big and difficult decisions. How often does a guess like that pan out? I guess you know the answer. Not very.
If the best you can get is unquantifiable and subjective data points, at least get it from a lot of people, i.e. the market.
Very few guesses are right, and that’s why we have very few successful products and even lesser revolutionary products in the world. Let the revolutionary wannabes make their guesses, focus on getting your research and economics right.
