Comment by BrunoBernardino
3 days ago
This is a great answer, thank you! Do you have any suggestions on how to "find a market"? What did you do, if you can share that? I think that would be incredibly helpful for the OP and many others.
3 days ago
This is a great answer, thank you! Do you have any suggestions on how to "find a market"? What did you do, if you can share that? I think that would be incredibly helpful for the OP and many others.
Firstly, I should say, there's no "formula" here. If there was I probably wouldn't post it on the internet :) Luck plays a part. (But you can work to give yourself more chance of good luck.)
If I had to try and distil it down, we dabbled a bit here an there, but what ultimately made the difference was "marketing". In the sense that we travelled quite a lot in the beginning, went looking for distributors (in international markets), tried to connect with potential customers wherever they hung out, and so on.
For example we make plug-ins to a very niche tool - but the users of that tool would have (in person) user groups - typically 10 to 15 people or so. I travelled the world going to those group meetings, organising meetups in places that didn't have them, showing an interest, and of course selling plugins. Today our user base is "established" and I hardly ever travel anymore.
For a major commercial product I visited similar markets to ours, knocked on the doors of distributors, tried to find people who wanted to integrate our product into their market. I failed a lot but succeeded twice, and those 2 have been paying us lots of money every year for 20 years as they make sales.
Your approach may vary. Start locally. Talk to shop keepers, restaurants, businesses, charities, schools and so on. Look for markets that are not serviced (which is different to where the person is just too cheap, or adverse to tech for other reasons.)
Of course it's a LOT harder now to find unserviced markets. There's a lot more software out there now than there was when I started out. Ultimately though it's about connecting with people - real people not just sending out spam emails. And so meeting the right person at the right time is "lucky". But if you're not out there luck can't work with you. You need to give luck a chance.
> Firstly, I should say, there's no "formula" here.
There are a lot of variables, and luck does play a big role. But with that said, there is something very akin to a "formula" at the high level. That being Steve Blank's "Customer Development" methodology, as laid out in The Four Steps to the Epiphany.[1]
[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Four-Steps-Epiphany-Steve-Blank/dp/09...
Thank you! Seriously, I appreciate it, and I'm sure many others will, too!
The two most straightforward ways are 1) build what you know, 2) talk to people about their needs.