The Sermon:
Your friends are not your market
This must be the third time I have written a post similar to this, but I think it’s important to repeat. So, you build this grand product and the way you are going to get the word out is through your friends. You tell your friends and they tell theirs and so on. Wrong.
There are several reasons this will not work:
1. You aren’t solving a problem they have — It’s rare that you have a bunch of friends and all of them have the same problem. Normally, you have friends from all walks of life. When you tweet out a message on twitter or facebook and think it will spread like wild fire, it wouldn’t because the product is not solving a problem of theirs.
2. Your product is not good enough — When your friends think about entrepreneurship and product, they expect a finished and polished product, but all you have is a crappy minimum viable product. They don’t want to be associated with anything crappy, so they will not share it or use it. Even if the product solves a problem they are having, it doesn’t solve it to the degree and finesse that your friends would like.
3. The message attenuates — You might override the two points above by pulling your friendship card which says loyalty to the end. This might word for your first degree of friends but what about the second and the third degree. Your friends aren’t going to pull their friendship card to other friends; they reserve that for really when something is important. But, this is important, that is exactly it. They don’t realise the importance of your product to you and how by spreading the word they keep your entrepreneurial dreams alive. They don’t see the value in the product and aren’t able to communicate such values with their friends.
So, what works:
What I find works is getting your product in front of a community with the problem you are trying to solve. You will find you have a higher probably of finding someone who is an early adopter of your product. Early adopters can tend to see the value in early products that are crappy. Then they can spread the word of the benefits of the product to themselves to other members of the community without any messages attenuation.
If you can’t find a community, then build one. Start a blog, create a forum or create a Skype group about the problem you are trying to solve.
