Create & Scale | 02. Refining Your Vision
The previous piece in this series laid out a process for how to have, capture, and start validating ideas. Check it out here.
The second step in creating and scaling a product is refining your vision.
Keep this step short and sweet. You don’t want to put in too much effort on this step before you validate your idea with potential customers.
We’ve found that filling out the below questionnaire helps quickly and easily build out the vision behind any product idea. Copy it, paste it, save it. Use it early and use it often.
Vision Refinement Questions
- What is the product?
- How will it make money?
- Who are your users?
- Who are your customers?
- Can you build a business around this product (target market estimate)?
- Is this a B2B or consumer product?
- What industry/area?
- Can you build this on your own or will you need help?
- Can you see yourself obsessing over this for 3–5 years (at least)?
- What are the next steps for validating this product idea?
Right now, you’re just doing basic vetting and research. Your work on this step should be enough to provide a more clear vision for the product, but itshould also be fast and painless. The whole thing should take you an hour or less.
To demonstrate this step, we answered the above questions and showed our work using our pretend product idea for this series. Let’s dive in!
What is the product?
An exercise app that uses AR to make aerobic exercise more fun and social.
The app lets runners, joggers, and walkers share images of their routes and progress with friends. Instead of showing the route they ran on an actual map, it overlays it in a fantasy world.
Imagine replacing the regular google map of your city with a detailed fantasy map. At the end of your run the app shows you where you went in the fantasy world. You can share your run with friends and also review your explorations after you’re done.
Before users start a run/walk/marathon/5k, they’re prompted to select which map they want to run on. Using the app, inviting friends, and sharing their progress out to social awards users with coins. They can use the coins to buy access to more maps/worlds.
Users create characters that act as their avatars in the app. Through this avatar users can gain experience, track progress, and meet other players. Users can also buy items for their avatars using the in-game coins.
This app will not require any wearables. It will simply track your route and progress using your phone. The tracking will be relatively simple, since it just needs to show the shape of the route you ran and the distance on a map.
Eventually well-known fantasy worlds could be on the table for free and purchase, but that’ll come later because licensing.
The problem this product is solving is that running, jogging, and walking are super boring for a lot of us. They’re things we know we should do, but that we don’t want to do. The goal of this app is to help more people live happier, healthier lives by making them want to run, walk, and jog.
How will it make money?
We’ll use a freemium model. This model works well for games and seems like a nice fit since our app is a hybrid fitness/mobile game/social app.
The app will be free to download and use. All features will be free, including the social aspects, character creation, long-term tracking, and goals/challenges alone and with friends.
If they’d like, users can make in-app purchases to upgrade their characters and the maps/worlds they can exercise in. Those purchases, as noted above, require in-game coins. Those coins can be earned through app usage. They can also be purchased, which is how we’ll make money.
Who are your users?
People who either like walking and running, or people who want to like walking and running.
We think everyone will enjoy playing our game eventually, but initially we’ll target the 35 and under crowd, college students, video game enthusiasts, and fitness app drop-outs.
Our users use apps for many parts of their daily lives and rely on them to help them meet people, find things to do, communicate, exercise, relax, keep track of finances, and more.
Our users aren’t looking to escape, they’re looking to improve their lives and have fun doing it.
Who are your customers?
Same as the users, for this product idea.
However, advertising and partnerships could be on the table in the future.
While we’d like to get to a place where we can license popular worlds to use as maps (you could run all around Hogwarts!), there are scenarios where including maps could be a revenue stream — for example, new release movies, video games, books, graphic novels, and even board games.
Can you build a business around this product?
I think we can. Here’s what I found with 15 minutes of research:
The fitness market is almost $29B. And, according to some unverified results on google, the average American adult spends $155 per month on their health and fitness — that’s an average of $112,000 in a lifetime.
So, yeah, people pay a lot for fitness stuff.
But that’s the total market, not our target market.
So let’s narrow it down.
The graph below shows the results of a survey conducted in the United States in March 2017. U.S. Adults were asked if they could imagine themselves using an app to track and monitor their fitness and exercise. According to the survey, 29 percent of those aged 18 to 29 utilize a fitness app regularly, compared to only 12 percent of those aged 61 years and older.
There are 45.5 million Americans between the age of 20 and 30. According to the survey noted above, about 30% of those regularly use a fitness app. That’s 13.6 million regular fitness app users. We’ll aim to capture 10% of that in 3–5 years.
Based on the rough vision above of who our initial users will be, we can estimate a target market of 1.4 million. That’s pretty small. But we’re not quite finished. There’s still that second group to consider: College students.
There’s some overlap with the above we can ignore for now, but there will be an estimated 20 million college students this upcoming fall. To keep things easy, let’s cut that number in half and carve out just 30% (the rate of people in that age range who regularly use fitness apps).
That’s a pool of 3 million college students, only some of which will use our app. I think we can get a higher rate of usage than 10% with this group, so let’s say 30% of this group will try and like our app. That’s another 1 million potential users.
OK, so we think we can top out at 2.4 million users for our initial addressable market. That’s a good start, but not really that exciting.
The good thing is that our product won’t make money off ads, so we don’t need 100 million users. With our Freemium model, almost two and a half million is a pretty good start, as long as we can entice users to stay active and spend money.
Which brings us to the most interesting find of this quick research sprint.
Garmin and Disney just introduced the vívofit jr. 2. It’s a fitness tracker for kids that has its own interactive mobile app featuring Disney Princess, Star Wars stories, and Marvel characters. Garmin’s new line of kids wearables features bands, games, and activities inspired by beloved Disney characters and stories.
Holy cow! This is our idea, just designed specifically for kids.
Except for the fact that we’re way behind and we’ll never get to partner with Disney, this is great news. Keeping in mind that the next big thing will look like a toy and kids are often onto cool new things before adults, this is really promising. (I had no idea about any of this before I had the idea we’re discussing or started writing this piece — I’m just finding out now, as I write this!)
Garmin sells their product for $70–80. Each one is compatible with a different themed app. They have princesses, Marvel, Star Wars, and Minnie Mouse. All but Minnie have more than one band/game option.
We’re not planning on having a hardware component yet, since we’re only concerned with distance and route, not steps. This will allow our product to reach more people initially than if a tracker was needed.
OK, so the target market is there. Now the question is, can we make enough based on our current model to build a business?
Our app is free and makes money from in-app purchases. Let’s say maps/worlds and other items start at $1 and maybe top out at $5 for now. Let’s also say that users will spend $5 a month on average. That’s if we do a really good job on the game and make it really sticky. If we set a realistic goal of 1 million active monthly users (less than half of our target market) that’s $5M in revenue a month.
We’re not talking Fortnite numbers, but that’s still $60M in annual revenue. 1 million active, paying users is a lot, but it’s not insane. And even just half of that is $30M in in annual revenue. Either are enough to build a business on.
For the purposes of refining our vision quickly and efficiently for this step, I think we’re good. In the next piece we’ll need to validate the product. We’ll also start figuring out if 1 million active monthly users is attainable and if a $5 per user average is realistic.
Is this a B2B or consumer product?
Consumer product. I know B2B is in right now, but this is what I know. There’s plenty of room for great consumer products right now, especially if they help people live happier, healthier lives.
What industry/area
Fitness apps.
More accurately, this is a fitness app masquerading as a social app disguised as a a mobile game.
Can you build this on your own or will you need help?
I’ll need help.
We’ll need at least one developer. A CTO co-founder, ideally.
We’ll also need one great designer. Preferably this person would have game experience and who can build out some really cool maps of fantasy worlds.
I can manage the fundraising, project management, partnerships, marketing, and other business stuff.
I’d offer stock, ownership, co-founder roles, whatever necessary. I can’t do this on my own so it’s worth doing what I need to to get the right people on board.
The three of us will be just the initial team to build a simple version of the app. We could launch it with three people, but to scale it we’d need to raise $1–2M at least.
Can you see yourself obsessing over this for 3–5 years (at least)?
Yes! I’m a huge nerd and I really (really) don’t like running/jogging.
I like to exercise and I’ve really tried to like jogging. I’ve lived my whole life wanting to like jogging. This is my chance to make that dream a reality while helping other nerds like me live healthier lives.
What are the next steps for validating this product?
I need to find a simple, cheap way to see if people would use this. A few ideas:
- Landing page that collects emails based on the concept with a small FB & PPC buy behind it
- Work with a dev friend to build a quick prototype, show the prototype around
- Both of the above, plus post to Product Hunt
- Find groups of people that fit my user profile, in real life and on the web, and ask them about the idea
What Next?
The third installment in our Create & Scale series will be all about turning your idea and vision into a product.
This stage in your journey to building a remarkable product and company will be the most dense and labor intensive so far.
We’ll layout a roadmap for validating your idea before, during, and after you turn it into a product. The continuous feedback loop has never been more important and it will be your best friend during this step.
