When we are working on a new business idea, we do look for potentially interested audiences from our immediate circle. There are two clear advantages of doing that – first, they are much more easily accessible than complete strangers, and secondly, they all mean well for you.
They are the perfect audience when you discuss your business model so you get some perspectives when it comes to prioritizing your action plan for testing assumptions.
They may or may not belong to the target segment that you want to go for. Even if they fit the profile of your target audience, they may or may not be your early adopters, despite them choosing to use your product.
Their decision to use your product may be out of a strong urge to be “nice” and “helpful” to you. And this urge may over dominate a “need” factor totally, even if it was there in the first place.
The bottom line is that your immediate network serves you the purpose of getting clarity on risk factors and prioritizing testing game plans. But they are not your early adopters.
You need to look beyond.
Where do you start?
You could of course pitch the idea to everyone in your target segment and see what they think! Wrong.
Not all people or businesses in that segment would be your early adopters.
And, you have limited resources and time to target people in a random way.
You need to meet only those who matter to you. And it is the early adopters who matter to you at this stage. Talking to others is a waste of resources.
The ideal candidates for you are the ones who:
- Have the problem that you are trying to solve;
- Are aware of the existence of the problem;
- Have already tried to solve the problem;
- Are unhappy with the current solution to the problem;
- Have a budget to get the problem solved
These are the people you want to target first.
They’re already looking for a solution, which means they are keen to solve their problem and they are possibly not happy with the options with them.
Your big work is taken care of when you don’t need to bring awareness about the existence of pain and you don’t need to convince them that they need to solve this problem.
This makes it an incredible fit!
What is left is really to present them something that will work for them.
Or, even better, get insights about their challenges with respect to the existing options and using those insights to build something new that works just perfect for them.