Your friends are not your market
The original post
Flashback to 2006, I was in the office of a Bank Manager discussing my website www.virtualstocktrading.com. I didn’t know the exact purpose of the meeting, all I was told that he wanted to talk to me about my website. At some point during the meeting, I was telling him how I have 800 members on the site. Then he proceeded to ask if most of them are my friends? To which, I kind of hanged my head and said no. Actually, only about two of my friends had sign up and it was probably out of loyalty. It was good that the demand for my site wasn’t artificially created but the other implication of not having much friends on my site is pretty hard to think about.
I see this pattern repeated for almost all my entrepreneurial efforts, even now withwww.timeline-x.com. At this point, I have learnt to accept that my friends will not be reading my blog or using my web app. There still remains the question of why didn’t they sign up?
Choose an arbitrary person and ask them the same question and you will have your answer. Yes it is simple, they weren’t interested. I doubt any amount of loyalty would cause them to continuously use or read anything I produce that they didn’t care about, and why would I want them to, it would be akin to slavery.
What my objective should have been is to find the right market for my product. Spending my time trying to figure out what type of people would care enough for my product to use it continuously.
Another possible reason why they haven’t join is that they aren’t the type of people who join things first. They are the wait and see type people. Geoffrey Moore identified in his book, Crossing the Chasm, there are five type of people in Adoption of Technology [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_adoption_lifecycle]. The first person to start the adoption lifecycle are innovators, but innovators compose 2.5% of the population.
Yep, there you go, if you have 100 loyal friends [exceedingly rare] your expectation should be about 3 of your friends to use whatever you produce. So, instead of loyal friends, target loyal customers.
