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.

◀   Overview   |   Step 2 - Marketing   ▶

Market, Marketing, Aesthetics, then Functionality

After reviewing our Trello board of app ideas that we've been collecting for the past several years, we settled on making an app to remember names.  After half a day of beginning to code, like all good programmers do, Russ said that we might want to take a different approach.  He read a quote from "Start Small, Stay Small: A Developer's Guide to Launching a Startup" by Rob Walling:

Market Comes First, Marketing Second, Aesthetics Third, and Functionality a Distant Fourth

The product with a sizeable market and low competition wins even with bad marketing, a bad aesthetic, and poor functionality. Think Quickbooks in the early days, or any niche product you've ever seen that looked like it was written by a six year old but sold thousands of copies.

In the same market, the product with better marketing wins. Every time.

In the same market with equal marketing, the product with the better design aesthetic wins. Sure, a few people will dig deep enough to find that the "ugly" product has better or more functionality, but the product that wins is the one that has the best looking website and user interface.

Functionality, code quality, and documentation are all a distant fourth. I know that this sounds sacrilegious to a software developer, but unless you're marketing to software developers, your order of importance is market, marketing, aesthetic, function.

This really rang true to us. Our tendency was to begin listing out features and coding. But what we recognized we needed to do was first get market, marketing, and aesthetics nailed down.  My next several posts will be dedicated to how we tackled each of these self-imposed prerequisites before starting coding features on Name Shark (www.nameshark.com).

Series Links

Here are the links to the four follow-up posts that I wrote to this article:

• Step 1 - Market
• Step 2 - Marketing
• Step 3 - Aesthetics
• Step 4 - Functionality

Step 1 - Market   ▶