Hello and welcome back to Startup Curious, where we discuss things you should know if you’re thinking about working for or starting a startup.
I spend a lot of time talking about choosing an initial customer to keep in mind when building your product. However, I’ve realized that this advice isn’t super intuitive - after all, why not build for as broad an audience as possible? That way, there’s more people to sell to!
Unfortunately, it doesn’t quite work that way. Generally, when introducing a new product to the market, you want to build it so that a small group falls absolutely in love with it, pays without much hesitation and recommends it to all of their friends. The best way to do that is to build close to exactly the product they need, with all the features they would choose themselves, and a minimal amount of features they find useless. If you build a product that only kind of appeals to a bunch of people, it’s difficult to get the traction you need to succeed, and you’ll find yourself fighting for every customer much longer than you should be.
When you’re juggling multiple potential customers at once, it’s really difficult to build a product that hits those requirements. Different types of customers will usually have different wishlists, which means you’ll likely be neglecting at least one of their needs when you choose to build a new feature… and you’ll likely pack your product with a bunch of stuff some of them will never touch. This doesn’t only apply to features of course - things like price point, partnerships, in-app recommendations, etc will all be impacted by the target customer you choose.
To use an example, let’s say you’re building an app to help couples plan date nights. If you choose to focus on couples with no kids that have been together less than two years, you may want to build something like a quiz where they can figure out what things they have in common that they would want to try. If you choose to focus on couples with kids who have been together at least 5 years, maybe integrating with a babysitting service would be a good idea.
Of course, it’s not always quite that blatant, but you get the picture.
It’s also important to know who you’re focusing on when building your product because you want to know who you’re speaking to when writing in-app copy, the marketing website, emails, etc. The language and things you choose to highlight will likely vary depending on audience, and if you don’t have a specific one in mind you may end up with some very generic messaging that appeals to no one.
This is part of why larger companies that target a ton of different customer types often make distinct landing pages that their ads lead to - so they have a bit more awareness over who’s looking at which page and they can adjust accordingly.
Now, if you’re hearing all this but finding yourself terrified at the thought of picking the “right” first customer to go after, don’t worry! It’s not necessarily something set in stone, and it can be adjusted as much as you need to as you gain information. In fact, it’s pretty common for companies to have a couple personas in mind when they first get started and then experiment a bit before choosing one to get laser-focused on.
And, of course - once you feel like you’ve built a product that that target customer loves, then you can always expand back out to try to capture another customer type. However, the key thing is not to rush it and build for too many customers, too soon… or else you’ll end up with a product a lot of people think is okay, but no one really loves.
Alright, that’s where we’ll wrap up for today. Next episode, I’ll be talking a bit more about how to narrow down your first customer type, so if you found this episode useful… don’t miss that! And of course, please remember to subscribe and share. Our goal is to make startups more approachable for everyone and the only way we can do that is to get the word out!
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If you have a topic you’d like to learn more about, or you’re a founder who would like their story featured on this show, send me an email at v@thescrappyoperator.com.
Why is it important to pick an initial target customer?