Finding your niche

After creating an MVP customers from across the technology adoption lifecycle (TAL) will start to use it. The problem is any user who is not in the “innovator” profile will not give you useful feedback. They will tell you that they will not use it until is does X, Y, Z or the price is not right etc.

This poses a problem as all this feedback comes in and you don’t know who to listen to. Sean Ellis devised a technique which allows you to pull out the innovators feedback and leave the rest for later by simply asking:

How would you feel if you could no longer use the product?

The options presented range from very disappointed to not disappointed. Any user who says they would be very disappointed are in the innovator category and their feedback is invaluable to help you find product market fit. You need to double down and win over this group of people before trying to scale a startup.

TwitchTV

Twitch started life as Justin.tv, a livestream of Justin Kan’s daily life 24 hours a day. Initially it drew crowds because of its novelty, but this soon wore off. Users kept requesting access so that they too could livestream. After modifying the site to allow this, it too was short lived (although it drew millions of viewers). With money dwindling the founders decided to focus on the group of streamers who would be the most disappointed if Justin TV closed. Emmett Shear suggested they look at the gaming segment after interviewing power users in this segment. At this time gaming was just 2% of the total viewership. They spun this segment off as Twitch (it was bought by Amazon for $970 million).

JustinTV attracted users from across the TAL but gamers represented just 2%, according to the TAL theory innovators represent 2.5% of a given market.

By using one simple question, they found their niche and product market fit.