As aspiring entrepreneurs we might all have ideas we might have concepts we might have thought of on the way to work, we might have thought in the shower.
But I think one of the key elements that will translate the potential of your idea to become a real business:
- Are you meeting a real need?
- Is there a real customer?
This will be the focus of what we are going to talk about today.
When we think about this to build a successful company we need something, product or service that meets the customer's needs or wants at a reasonable price.
We will talk about this interaction between needs and desires as well as about price.
What are the basic questions to determine the real need?
The key questions to determine the true need are:
- Is there an unresolved problem and do you have any evidence or research to support this?
- Is there a better way to solve this problem that you can put on the market?
- Can you do it for a better price sustainably?
So being temporarily cheaper isn't necessarily a great solution because your competitors may lower prices as well.
But is the way you do it fundamentally different? You can sustainably offer a lower price because your expenses will be sustainably lower than competitors.
How to study existing products and customers to “know” the needs and desires?
So we want to study what's out there, we want to see needs and wants. One way to do this is to really think about what we can do to get opinions and reviews from a lot of people.
Sources of pain or exacerbations are key opportunities for new products and how can we do this effectively to find out the problem? And we want to know the sources of this pain or exacerbation.
- Are there complaints from customers?
- Is there other evidence of an unfulfilled need that we can succeed at as an entrepreneur?
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| Search Amazon for iPhone accessories, for example |
A great way to do this is product review sites. Now we might find, when we go to sites like this, so if we have an idea of some kind of new speaker system we don't want to compete directly with Apple and make iPhones but we want to compete in the iPhone accessories market and we think we might have a better way of speaker technology the others are there.
So one way to get a sense of the relative satisfaction level of the market is to go in and read the reviews and see what happens so we can look up DOCS for iPhone and see what's out there.
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| An image showing a customer review of the product |
We can detail that and we can go ahead and we can see in this case more than 1000 customer reviews it will be almost impossible to get that level of detail by doing any level of surveys and if we do surveys it will take a lot of time and it will be expensive.
What we can do here very quickly is go online for free and draw conclusions that we can do from a variety of customer reviews.
Identifying a need is just the beginning. After we've identified it, we really need to think about what we can do about it and think about the future and future of those needs. .
How to collect information about customer preferences?
We want to collect information about preferences and customer preferences and we want to evaluate those preferences and think about what they tell us through interviews through focus groups, we may bring a small group of people together for a conversation or via surveys.
And think not only about what they are saying now but what that means in the future? How do we build a lasting solution?
We also want to realize that customers may not fully understand what they want and what the solution is.
So we have to exercise some of our ability and some of our own insight to predict what is out there or learn about the basic values or needs and desires that we need or think about in the future.
See: Mental Characteristics of Entrepreneurs
What are online market research resources?
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| Resources you can access |
There are massive resources in the age of the internet this is a small snapshot of the types of resources you can access which is a mixture of government resources.
Private Sector Resources, largely free resources, where you can learn about companies, products, markets and customers.
It is an endless list this is compiled here by looking at federal and US statistics as well as statistics from Europe and abroad to work on various public library sources as well as in large data sets.
Therefore, you have tremendous access to understanding today's industries and markets.
Focus, creative research and the use of intuition
So, we need to focus, research, and we need to use a little bit of intuition. We don't need to satisfy every imaginable customer need. A customer might need ten but is really willing to pay only five.
And we might just have a really good idea of how to serve four of them or to get to fifth place it might take a year but if we wait that long one of our competitors might beat us.
This is the place again you don't have to fulfill every imaginable need you may not be able to get there and if you get there you may be too late or if you get there early and try to do everything it may be more expensive than the customers are willing to bear.
So for that we want to focus on products and services that we can create and launch successfully and in the relatively short term.
We can create a minimally purchasable product, launch it, get feedback, iterate, and do it all over again and that we understand that our first product or service is not our last product or service.
Most of what we buy today is v2, v4 or vv, so in that context also we don't want to get caught up in trying to build a perfect solution.
So we want to achieve important preferences and we want to think about what we can add, what we can improve, and what's important versus other important features or functionality.
We also want to think about segmentation and what do different customers want? We probably won't have a one-size-fits-all solution.
So in this context, when we think about opportunities and when we think about how to meet real needs we want to look creatively
- We want to learn from the research done by others
- We want to use our intuition, we want to think about segmentation
- We want to think about where there is a feature, and where there is a profile or category of customers that we can successfully serve and serve.
See: What are the Tangible and Intangible Complementary Assets of Companies