Not enough customers sticking around? Blame product. Not enough customers converting from free to paid? Blame product. Just not enough traction? Scrap product, and pivot!
Too often both business and technical founders use product as a scapegoat for the lack of traction, and an excuse to pivot. In most cases the product is not the culprit. Here’s how you know you have a product issue: your customers are signing up to use the product and then complaining!
They care enough to message you and say, “Hey, I wanna use this thing, but I can’t!”
If instead you hear crickets chirping, in the form of inactive users, there’s nothing wrong with your product per se, there’s a problem with your marketing. You haven’t done enough market research.
Of course its much easier to just keep building, scraping, and pivoting, instead of actually having a conversation with people in real life!
The next time you want to scrap or scapegoat your product, stop! Instead do these 3 things:
1. Ask yourself the honest question, who are you building this product for? Once you have an idea, go out into the world, and find those people. Ask them for 15 minutes of their time. Show them the product, and ask for feedback!
2. If you do step 1 and the feedback is mostly positive: Find out more about these people: Where do they hang out? What do they read? Who are their friends? What is their age/sex/location?
3. If you do step 1 and the feedback is mostly negative: as in these people would never use your product, think broader to discover the people who would! Hint: they are probably possess the exact opposite characteristics of the people you just chatted with! (Do this assuming you still care about building this particular product.)
All steps done? Great! This is called customer discovery and development. It’s the step that comes before product development. Don’t beat yourself up. We all make this mistake at least 100 times or more, because we’re eager to build, resist the urge as much as possible, and go discover who those early adopters are!
If you’ve enjoyed this post and want to learn more strategies for saving your product and attracting customers, then check out our Lean Product Development Course Learn more!
