This session is the opposite of Go-to-Market and Marketing Execution, which focus on "putting lipstick on the pig." We'll frame two ends of a product inception spectrum -- a) design a product that you'd want to buy and b) analyze a market to figure out what they're likely to buy -- and discuss the practical realities between the two.

1. Which customers are you
building the right product for?
Paul Teich
@paulrteich
FB: paul.teich
LI: paulteich
paul@productlensllc.com
Contributing Analyst
paul@moorinsightsstrategy.com

3. Session Format: Ask the Expert
Session Category: Opportunity Analysis
Target Audience: Essentials, Entrepreneurs
Opposite of…
Go-to-Market and Marketing Execution
+
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4. Product Inception Spectrum
• Design a product that you'd want to buy
• Analyze a market to figure out what they're
likely to buy
Design Design
for for
Me Them
Practical realities are somewhere in-between
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5. What You Want to Buy
You…
• speak with one voice
• have an easy to characterize pain point
• have a usage model in mind to address it
• have visualized the resulting product / service
• know that at least one person will buy it
…and frankly, who wouldn’t?
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6. Downside to Small Sample Sizes
• Who do you represent?
• If you poll your friends, are they a lot like you?
false-consensus sample bias
confirmation bias group-think
locusts forty days of darkness
• What is “normal?”
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7. What They Want To Buy
They…
• don’t speak with one voice
• don’t have identified or clearly articulated
pain points
• have no idea what “usage model” means
• can only visualize incremental improvements
• have to be convinced that your problem will
address their pain points
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8. Who Are They?
• People (B2C)
– Demographic – population characteristics
– Behavioral – loyalty, purchase patterns
– Psychographic – personality, values, attitudes,
interests, lifestyles
• Organizations (B2B)
– Firmographic – characteristics of orgs
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9. How Do You Find Out?
• Expert opinion
• Ethnography
• Focus groups
• Talk to people
No, really, find some people to talk to…
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10. Normal Behavior
• Statistically measurable…
…as in “normal distribution”
• Find a relevant pain point
– For a lot of people
– Who can afford a solution
– At a price that you can serve
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Discrete_Gaussians.svg
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11. Finding the Norm
• Measurable
Qualitative data can be economically collected
• Substantial
Audience is usefully large
• Homogeneous inward
Constituents are enough alike that they behave as a
flock (for key attributes)
• Heterogeneous outward
Constituents are measurably different from others
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12. Sizing, Segmenting,
and Forecasting Markets
• This is a another full session for next PCA
• It’s outside the scope of this discussion
• http://www.slideshare.net/pteich/sizing-
segmenting-and-forecasting-markets
• I need to update it at some point…
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13. Example: 1999-2002
• Pain point: info overload
• Developed by/for: geeks
• “Personal Insight Network”
– Empowers you to quickly and
easily use the information
that you value
• Audiences
– Content providers
– Corporate portals
– Internet service providers
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14. Example: 1999-2002
• Pain point was emergent
– PDAs were luxury items, smartphones did not exist
– Consumer households did not yet have multiple PCs
– Notebook PCs were still expensive
– Etc.
• And so the audience was not large
– Consumers did not have a high level of pain yet
– So we were designing for workers like us
• Y2K recession, in 2001 corporations stopped buying
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15. Example: 1999-2002 (RIP)
• Who succeeded?
Evernote.com
Evernote is a platform for human memory, designed to help
individuals remember everything™
– Early 2008 private beta; service went public in June 2008
– Grew despite downturn by addressing maturing pain points
• And who didn’t? Microsoft Office OneNote
Keep tabs on your life
– Announced in November 2002, shipped one year later
– Eventually bundled with Office
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16. Creative Tension
You must be passionate about your target audience
Design Design
for for
Me Them
Be realistic about how many people you are designing for.
If you can’t identify with them at some level,
then find someone who can.
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