Step 1 - Market

As I explained in my post Market, Marketing, Aesthetics, then Functionality, startup developers need to resist the powerful urge to start coding features and focus on three things that are more important.  The first of those is

Market

For Name Shark we had the idea of creating an app that helped people to remember names. To figure out the Market, we had to answer the following questions:

• Who will use the product?
• Who will pay for the product?
• What pain(s) are we trying to alleviate with that particular user?
• Is it painful enough to use a new product?
• Is it painful enough to pay for a new product?
• Is there another product that already solves the problem.
• If so, is the market big enough for competition?

Resist the temptation to say, "Everyone will use the product."  Even if that is true, you need to be thinking of specific use cases as you develop the product that make sense to specific user groups.

We came up with six primary users that we thought would be very likely to use and pay for a really good app that could help them to stop forgetting names.  We listed them on our Trello board, and we referred to them constantly throughout development.  As we coded, we added several more.

Here was our original list of users:

• Sales person who wants to remember his clients' names by faces
• Event coordinator who wants to create a list of VIPs to send to hosts
• Club or congregation member who wants to remember members' names and faces
• Teacher (or admin) who wants to remember children's names
• New employee who wants to get to know the other people at the company
• Sports fan who wants to learn team members (number, position, and stats may be more important than face.)

We felt that each of these customers felt would have a big enough desire to remember names/faces/details that they would pay for the product.  We constantly referred back to these profiles to make sure our product was on track to meet their needs.  We searched to see if there was already a product that solved this pain point.

Who are your customers?  Can you answer the questions above for them?

Remember--resist the urge to code before you know who your market is.  That way you'll know that if you hit your target, there should be a group of people willing to buy it.

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