My celebrity gossip website has a mailing list now. Not,
like, a Google Group sort of thing; rather, an actual mailing list where people
go to a page and enter their email address for the express purpose of receiving
some manner of email communication from, well, me.
When I announced this on my Twitter, a friend replied back,
“Welcome to 2003!”
That’s kind of how I felt, too. What on
earth would I email to these people?
And why – whyyyy??? – would anyone
voluntarily sign up for a mailing list from a news website that they can just add to their RSS feed?
But over the past several months, I’ve been talked into it,
both by friends whose opinions I value and by stakeholders in the company.
I was almost embarrassed to announce it. I expected it to be
an enormous flop.
My Target Market Behaves Differently Than I Do
Rather, readers signed up in droves. Many of them even had
suggestions for the newsletter’s content. Some were actionable and some not so
much; I only wish I had exclusive naked photos of Alexander Skarsgard. (Actually,
I wish I had any naked photos of
Alexander Skarsgard.) But I can send
out weekly lists of the most-commented or most-viewed stories, and I can use
the list to inform readers of new contests or job openings or polls. Yes, polls. They asked to be emailed about
new polls.
Here’s the point it drove home: I am not my target market.
I should have done this years ago. I did not, because I was
thinking like me, and not like my market. When I started this site, I was
living in LA, a 24-year-old with 23-inch blonde hair extensions, and I followed
celebrity gossip like it was my full-time job. I didn’t know what RSS meant. I
just wanted to be the first person alive to know if anything – anything at all – happened in Paris Hilton’s life, and I would have
signed up for any mailing list that could ensure that.
I used to be my target market. I am not anymore. It’s an
adjustment.
Startups That Plan to Be Their Target Market Don't Always Wind Up That Way
I'm facing a comparable issue in another startup. The team is building an
iPad/iPhone app called CrowdMap. It allows
multiple users to collaborate on mind maps, hosted in the cloud, in real-time.
It’s a very, very cool product, and it’s being developed by talented,
passionate devs who love mind-mapping and who have used mind maps for years as
part of the GTD and Agile communities.
My responsibility on this team is marketing. Here’s the
problem I keep seeing: Our product is by no means the best pure
mind-mapping app out there. If what you want to do is build mind maps for your
personal use, there are products on the market with sexier UIs and broader
feature sets, products built by companies who have years-long head starts on
us, full-time staff, and are not, ya know, bootstrapped.
None of these existing products allow for the real-time
collaboration available in our product. That’s our differentiator. So we keep
trying to position this product as a mind-mapping application that allows
real-time collaboration.
Adjusting Your Market Mindset
So far, it’s not working as well as we’d hoped. I suspect
that’s because the hard-core mind-mapping market wants hard-core mind-mapping
tools, and they don’t see enough value in the collaborative aspect of our
product to forgo some of the other features our app is lacking.
We need to figure out who our target market is. For whom is
the real-time collaboration most valuable? Is this a product for students,
building outlines together in a classroom? For conference-goers working
together to capture every detail of a speaker’s monologue? For writers,
outlining a book or an article together? We should be asking ourselves who needs to collaborate and brainstorm on-the-go rather than who needs to mindmap.
Embracing and Learning Your Actual Market
Rather than trying to play catch-up to the feature sets of
the established mind-mapping apps, we've learned we need to focus on other markets – markets
consisting of folks who might not be hard-core mind-mappers, but who could
certainly benefit from this collaborative functionality as they brainstorm --
and think about what feature sets they
need.
Despite our initial plan, we have built a product that, when
compared to what we consider our competition, is about collaboration first and mind-mapping
second. Now we need to focus on features that aid in collaboration, rather
than on features that aid in mind-mapping. If we can do that, we have the
potential to take the market by storm. It’s just not the same market we’d
initially planned to take by storm.
We are not our target market anymore.