Why You Should Market First and Build Products Later
The logic is this: If you have not identified a clear existing market (a viable user group for a given product or service) then what are you doing writing code? Rather than sell first develop later, I venture that you should Market First and Build a Product later.
Photo by ChipHunn.
I’d like to reference here two great ideas from Marc Andreesen (via Sean Ellis‘ Post) and Eric Ries (via Venture Hacks‘ Post) that have inspired my take on this concept.
“…what correlates the most to success — team, product, or market? Or, more bluntly, what causes success? And, for those of us who are students of startup failure — what’s most dangerous: a bad team, a weak product, or a poor market?“- Marc Andreesen
And in that article Marc goes into detail about why a great market will compensate for a mediocre (or worse) team and product. Here is a dead simple analogy I came up with to illuminate it:
When you are lost and dehydrated in a desert and come across a well filled with murky brown water, will you drink that water to save your life? Yes. Is that Optimal? No.
The key here is to identify market opportunities by finding a pain point– an acute problem or burning need whether through surveys, market research, or your own simple observations. Before you ever develop the code, find a desert and be the well. Then work on purifying the water only once people start to drink it. This is what I mean by marketing (having what people want to begin with) instead of sales ( just getting rid of what you have).
This segues nicely into Eric Ries’ recent interview on Venture Hacks where he talks about building the “Minimum Viable Product” (or minimum new feature of your existing product) and split testing it on a small cohort of users (100 or less will do) and iterating rapidly based on your findings.
“(paraphrasing)…We added a VIP Area banner to IMVU and although very few people clicked on it, we found that the sample group on average spent noticeably more money elsewhere on the site.”-Eric Ries
Note that they did not actually build a VIP Area… they simply built a banner which said it exists and displayed it to one hundred users in their beta. When a few of those people clicked they simply received a message that said “Hey there! We’re having technical difficulties…” and then were sent an apology letter. If IMVU did this with a different idea and saw that seventy-five, fifty, or even thirty-three users out of the hundred clicked it, then the apology letter would also include “we will let you know when this is fixed.” And then they rapidly begin the very healthy evolutionary process of iterating on direct need and demand– it admittedly helps if you are agile and with a low turnaround time, but the point still stands.
This is just one example of an existing service testing a single new feature, but it could just as easily be done for an entirely new product or service simply by setting up a landing page which contains a description, mock-up, or prototype and sending a few dollars worth of AdWords clicks to it to determine viability. This test is the part where it is important to take your rough code and turn it into a rough product whether you are making a simple test or full-blown prototype! And this is what I am great at– all those bits and pieces that make code into a product.
So, in conclusion – test until you find a new desert, or test to see if there are hidden deserts in parts of your product and start building wells to bring up that muddy water fast! It all boils down to achieving Product / Market Fit — the first step of any successful startup.
Again, thanks go out to Eric and Marc as well as Venture Hacks and Sean Ellis for the inspiration.
Shameless Self-Promotion: Want to identify new or existing deserts, and fit your product to new user needs succinctly and intelligently? Hit up my about page for contact info so we can talk about how I can help your business.
