The Question Almost No One Asks — Who Is The Thing For?

“Having no specific user in mind is one of the eighteen major mistakes that kills startups.” — Paul Graham, Y Combinator

Most of us are creating something. For some, it might be a piece of art, a song or a book. Others write software, fill documents or construct buildings. Regardless of what we are creating, we need to know who we are doing it for — and who we are not doing it for. Otherwise, we might be spending our time doing something that is not valued by anyone but us.

Yes, we would like to believe that anything we create would be for everyone. After all, we see the need to create it, and our closest family and friends root for us to do that. However, we cannot expect to scratch an itch we cannot identify. Nor do we have the resources to get the word out to everyone. Therefore we need to figure out who we are making it for before we finish.

The absence of an intended audience is not just a commercial problem. For example, I have faced it many times when writing this blog. There are all sorts of thoughts I would be interested to seek answers to by writing. But I see how there would only be an audience of me. Thus not making sense for taking an hour or so per day. Instead, I have chosen to write for aspiring entrepreneurs with interest in all sorts of gadgets.

In fact, the best way people have found to avoid missing any target is to identify a proxy from the outset. Someone who represents the ideal audience, who we think about constantly throughout the creative process. While setting up marketing strategies, we call this process finding your buyer persona.

If we don’t know who we are doing it for, how will we know if we are doing it right? How will we know if we have done it? Weare unlikely to hit a target we have not aimed for. Hope is not helpful here; having something and someone to measure against is.

So, do you know who are you doing it for?

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