Make your product fit to the market
An introduction to the product-market-fit, how it relates to your marketing return-on-invest and what it has to do with building products with a service design approach.
When people talk about marketing in early-stage web/mobile startups, it’s often about generating traffic, building a brand or getting media coverage. These are all essential parts - sure. But when it comes to your startup’s number one priority - it’s all about building products that the market wants.
No matter what you are building in the digital space - there’s some problem you are trying to solve with your startup’s core idea,which in your business model becomes your product and the market that you seek to address.
These two building blocks directly effect your marketing in terms of channels and revenue. What’s called the ‘product-market-fit’ is the line that connects those two - and that’s probably the most valuable aspect in your startup’s DNA.
Why most startups fail very early
If you take a look at a typical startup failure process, the collapse is always the fact that customers don’t buy the product.
Idea → build it → launch it → customers don’t buy → startup dies.
Here’s why:
What you need is a minimum-sellable product instead of a minimum-viable product. It’s all about jobs-to-be-done. Users don’t buy your product because they like it, but because its either a pain reliever or a gain creator.
The importance of the conversion
Illustrating traction (traffic, app downloads, etc.) and time on a simple graph. Obviously, you would think that you want as much traction as fast as possible. You’re obviously wrong. Because what you really want is paying customers, which relates to turning your users into actual customers. In other words: converting your traffic into money.
Here’s your ideal traction-time graph, split into two phases:
1) Building a product that the market wants and
2) Scaling the company around a product
How to build a product that the market wants
Let’s focus on the product-market part of the business model.What connects the two is how you distribute your product and how you derive revenue.There’s one essential building block missing: How you engage with your users.
Let’s simplify this:
1) Getting the product into users’ hands
2) Validating that you’ve built the right product, people are using it
3) Making money from those engaged users
Your mission is, to transform these three aspects to be iterative. As soon as you’re efficient acquiring customers and making revenue, you have a product that the market wants.
You invest x amount of money into generating reach (traffic) and making x euros in return (revenue). In the end, that’s your marketing ROI:
Which leads to the challenging question: How can you work on your startups retention - how do you engage users?
Design can change business
Design is more than just pretty. Conversation rates are design-driven.A high conversion rate means that you reach your product-market-fit faster.
Design thinking: The essential ability to combine empathy, creativity and rationality to meet user needs and drive business success
The screen brings with it different kinds of challenges for visual design, some of which occur exclusively in interactive media. Let’s go through a typical service design process.
1) Strategy
«What do we want?» meets «What do ours users expect?»
2) Scope
Transforms strategic goals into features and content, but be careful: Think in benefits for the user, not in technical feature specs.
3) Structure
What’s important, what’s relevant? Create flows and user-journeys.
4) Sekeleton
Sketch wireframes and build working, click- or tap-trough prototypes
5) Surface
Interface meets your brand design.
Why iterate?
When you design something, you instantly become the worst person in world to evalute whether or not the idea is a good one. The idea might makes sense to your head, but might not to others. That’s why great designers have a distinct ability for empathy.
So you need to iterate, as often as you can. Make your team work together. Get fast, ship early, ship often. Accept and lead the change.
Validate. Learn. Confirm. And repeat.
As easy as it might sound: Find the right solution for the right problem first. Ask questions like: “Do they care?”, “Do they need it?”, “Do they have the budget?”, “Does it solve their problem?”, “Do they understand it?”, “Would they pay for it, if so, how much?
Bottom line:
Get an efficient marketing ROI through iterative service design.
