Have you ever heard the expression “There’s a market for everything”? With the rise of online businesses, people are taking more chances and bringing more creative offerings to the market. As an aspiring business owner, this may tempt you to hurry up and jump in so you don’t miss the wave.
Many people bring new products to the market even without any indication that they may sell. Unfortunately, many of those businesses are doomed to fail even before they start.
In this post, I’ll give you 5 questions you should ask yourself before you decide what products to bring to the market.
What Audience Do You Want to Serve?
Many entrepreneurs make the mistake of creating a product without ever thinking about the people who will be consuming it. Who are they? What jobs do they hold? What does every day life look like for them? Why do you care?
You should be passionate about the audience you serve in your business. Making things easier or better for them should motivate you to get up every day and do the tough work your business requires. If you aren’t passionate about the audience, you may not have a successful business in the long term.
What Problem Does This Audience Face?
If you know your audience well, then you should know the biggest challenges they face in everyday life. For example, maybe you’re left handed and can identify with the struggle of trying to write without smearing ink all over the page.
Maybe you’re passionate about new moms and how difficult it can be to find safe, affordable products to use with their newborns.
Having a deep understanding of your audience’s problem will help you come up with the most effective way of solving it.
What Qualifies You to Solve This Problem?
What experience do you have that makes you uniquely able to help solve these problems? Maybe you have formal education in the subject. Perhaps you’ve worked in the industry for years and spotted inefficiencies along the way. Or maybe, you just have the time, finances and passion to see it through.
One thing’s for sure. If you aren’t confident that you’re the right person for the job, your competitors will come along and exploit that weakness.
Can You Do This in a Cost-Effective Way?
One of the main objections you will hear when it’s time to sell your product is it’s price. If the audience you’re targeting can’t afford your solution to their problem — then it’s not really much of a solution, is it?
When you’re brainstorming solutions to your audience’s challenges, you must consider how much it will cost to make it happen. Does the benefit of your product outweigh its cost? Will it cost you so much to produce that you’ll need an unreasonable number of orders to be profitable? If so, you may need to go back to the drawing board. Even if not, there’s still one glaring question that needs to be answered.
Will People Buy It?
This is the most important question you’ll need to answer about your product. It doesn’t matter how fancy or feature-filled your product is. If there is no demand for it, it will fail.
A quick Google search for “failed product launch” will yield tons of results. The Ford Edsel, New Coke, Microsoft’s Zune… All examples of well-intended products from already established companies. How could these multi-million dollar corporations launch products that failed so miserably? The answer is simple — they never asked the market what it wanted.
There are several ways to test demand for your product. You can survey your friends and associates. You can create a prototype and take it to trade shows. You can create focus groups to test iterations of the product. You can even take pre-orders for your product. But whatever you do, don’t be so arrogant as to think you can go straight to market from intuition alone.
Let’s Go to Market
If you can confidently answer all 5 of these questions, you’re well on your way to a successful product launch. Next in this series, we’ll talk about the second P in the Marketing Mix — Distribution. Be sure to subscribe to our e-mail list so you don’t miss out.