The question everyone asks is: Who is the bootcamp for? Who can benefit from your visual thinking technique?
This is actually one of the questions I don’t know the answer to. Yep, I don’t have a well defined “target audience.” A lot of people look at me in a weird way when I say this, and lecture me on how important it is to know who you are talking to, if you want to effectively market something.
Now, I of course agree completely. I know they are right. I know that having a clearly defined and well-understood target audience would allow me to do much deeper user research, and based on my findings, I would be able to pinpoint the specific pain points and frustration that these people experience in their life and work. Then I could hire copywriters to help craft the perfect message that really hits on these and shows how my bootcamp exactly can help them.
But how do you figure out what your target audience is? Especially when you don’t have any real money to invest in research? I have tried flipping the situation on its head. In fact, the question of target audience is one of the questions I am trying to answer by going on world tour (rather then trying to answer before I go).
This means that I am not marketing my course “effectively.” Instead my course is marketed to different people in different parts of the world. Some are just followers of my work. Others are friends or colleagues of followers. They work in many different industries. It’s not a perfect approach by any means. But it works just well enough that I can sell out one in five classes and and make four out of five classes financially viable. This means that I am getting paid, at least modestly, while doing the market research. Another benefit is that I am not testing the idea through a prototype or dummy. It’s the ACTUAL class that I am teaching and the feedback I get is both relevant for marketing and product development.
After the first five courses and a total of about 50 participants, these are some of the profiles I have seen so far:
I had a doctor who was a leading coordinator of the Ebola response in Africa a few years ago. He had flown from Ohio to NYC to attend my course and found it valuable.
In australia I had a lot of people who work with software, both software engineers, project managers, UX designers, scrum masters, agile coaches and quality analysts. They liked it very much too. This was the biggest surprise for me so far. If I had made assumptions instead of exploring, I would never have targeted software people and it consultants.
A lot of creative and new entrepreneurs have loved it too, but are not always able to pay the cost, so while it is valuable to them, it may not be a viable business to offer the course to them.
I have also had people from finance, marketing, branding, and many more industries, but I don’t have a clear pattern yet.
As I keep doing this I will hopefully keep finding patterns and eventually I might be able to narrow down and focus. Perhaps there will be a Think Clearly Class for Software people and another one for Business Analysts. Maybe. Maybe not. Perhaps the greatest benefit is in the diversity of the group? Whatever it is, I trust that I will eventually find it. One step at a time.
Mathias Jakobsen is the creator of Think Clearly. He is currently traveling the world to teach others how to integrate their creative and analytical mind using simple tools like pen and paper. Ask him anything on Twitter.
The class will take place in cities all over the world.
- London July 30th — sign up
- Zurich August 22nd — sign up
- Bern August 23rd — sign up
- Montreal August 29th — sign up
- Buenos Aires September 3rd — sign up
- Porto Alegre September 26th — sign up (in partnership with School of Design Thinking)
- São Paulo September 28th — sign up (in partnership with School of Design Thinking)
- Amsterdam October 17th — sign up
