“If you can describe the problem better than your customer they will assume you have the solution.”
– Pat Flynn
Why research your audience?
Understanding your customers’ struggles is key to building software they want.
People want their lives to be better. What stands in their way? Obstacles. They hire products to help them overcome those hurdles.
For example, I might overhear my neighbors talking: "I really wish my front lawn looked better," (that's their desire for a better life). "But, I just don't have time to take care of it," (that's the obstacle). "I should hire the landscaper that Jack uses," (that's a product helping them overcome the obstacle).
The purpose of doing research is to uncover customer desires. Finding an idea that people will pay you for is challenging. Patrick McKenzie highlights this here:
“If you’re not targeting one of the top two most pressing issues in my life, I’m not going to buy your thing.”
To market your product, you will need to figure out what your audience desperately wants.
Aside: The case studies and data you collect will also help you promote your product. Anecdotes from your audience will inform the headlines and marketing copy you write on your website.
The research process
The research phase follows these steps:
- Determine who your audience is, and where they hang out.
- Collect data by observing people online and doing interviews. This could occur on Twitter, on forums, or on sites such as Quora. You’re looking for frequently asked questions and common pain points.
- Prune the data. Examine your data and identify patterns. Remove the outliers and identify the results that occur repeatedly. The question you’re trying to answer is: “What is a struggle that needs to be solved? Where are they getting stuck?”
- Create a hypothesis: what is the most relevant problem?
- Test your hypothesis: offer a small fix for their problem and observe how they respond. You could provide a 7-day email course, a little software tool, or a one-day workshop. Judge the response by how many people sign up.
- If your test is successful, continue adding value. If not, go back to step 2.
In the last chapter, we covered the first phase (finding your audience). Next, you’ll need to research your audience to discover what they want.
Unearth the struggle
To find a problem worth solving, you need to recognize patterns. It takes time to hone this skill, but with practice, you’ll learn to do it intuitively. Hang out with your audience and keep your eye open for recurring themes.
Having an audience that congregates online is an advantage because they’re easier to observe. You can read their interactions in comments, forum threads, and Twitter exchanges. When you do this every day, week after week, you should start to see some patterns.
Coffee example
Let’s pretend “coffee snobs” is our audience. Where would we find this type of coffee drinker?
Reddit. This is a good place to start because there are subreddits for a wide range of topics.
Sure enough, when I go toreddit.com/r/coffee in my web browser, this pops up:
Well, you do love coffee right? Why else would you be here? It turns out that /r/coffee loves coffee too. In fact, I think we all love coffee! So let’s talk about it here. The world of coffee is more complex than just a tasty caffeinated beverage to get you going. This is a place to talk about the farms, the beans, the baristas, the roasters, the industry, the brewing gear and your specially tuned brewing techniques. It’s a place to ask questions about how to make your daily cup just a little bit better. It’s a place to learn, share and make new friends. Welcome to /r/coffee!
Next step: hang out. Log in every day, and listen. What are the recurring themes?
Bookmark the themes you see repeatedly. You can use a tool like Pocket or Keeeb to do this. In Keeeb, you can even drag and drop the snippets you’ve saved into different groupings.
After you’ve collected data over a period of 3–6 months, trends will emerge. In the case of coffee, the predominant pattern might be: How do I build a pour-over stand?
Prune your data so that the real insights emerge. Remove the outliers and focus on the topics that seem to be getting the most traction.
Write your hypothesis
Once you’ve pruned your data, you’ll write your theory about what customers want:
Help me build a pour over stand so that I can impress my coffee snob friends.
Put this on paper and look at it. Do you believe it? Is this your audience’s biggest desire? Go back to your notes and look at all the supporting evidence you collected. Once you’re sure, move on to the next step.
Prove your hypothesis
It’s not enough to have a theory; you need to test it! Here are a few methods for testing whether you’ve struck a legitimate pain:
Landing page with call-to-action
To ensure that you’ve hit the right nerve, create a landing page that highlights the pain. My friend Jarrod Drysdale did this beautifully with this page at thetinydesigner.com.
At the end of this page, he included a call to action (CTA) asking readers to sign up for a free 5-week email course. Offering a free resource and asking for an email address is an effective method for gauging interest. If many people download your free guide, you know you’re onto something.
Find ten people who say they’ll buy
Ultimately, there’s only one way to ensure that your product idea is good: will people pay money for it?
Finding customers is often the last step in our product development process. We think: “First, I’ll come up with the idea, then I’ll build it, and then I’ll go find people who want to buy it.”
That process is backward. It’s better to bring your idea to people and ask if they’d pay for it. You could present it to them as a landing page, a press release, or a working prototype. Even better: offer them a solution right now by solving their pain manually.
It’s important to ask them for a commitment: “If I built this, would you pay for it?”
Jason Cohen of WPengine advocates going even further and asking for a check from them on the spot.
Success! Go forth and build
Once you’ve confirmed that you’ve found a “job to be done,” it’s time to make the initial version of your product (or feature, if you’re expanding on an existing product).