Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on Seattle 2.0, and imported to GeekWire as part of our acquisition of Seattle 2.0 and its archival content. For more background, see this post.
By Sasha Pasulka
My celebrity gossip website has a mailing list now. Not,like, a Google Group sort of thing; rather, an actual mailing list where peoplego to a page and enter their email address for the express purpose of receivingsome 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 onearth would I email to these people?And why – whyyyy??? – would anyonevoluntarily 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 bean enormous flop.
My Target Market Behaves Differently Than I Do
Rather, readers signed up in droves. Many of them even hadsuggestions for the newsletter’s content. Some were actionable and some not somuch; I only wish I had exclusive naked photos of Alexander Skarsgard. (Actually,I wish I had any naked photos ofAlexander Skarsgard.) But I can sendout weekly lists of the most-commented or most-viewed stories, and I can usethe list to inform readers of new contests or job openings or polls. Yes, polls. They asked to be emailed aboutnew 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 wasthinking like me, and not like my market. When I started this site, I wasliving in LA, a 24-year-old with 23-inch blonde hair extensions, and I followedcelebrity gossip like it was my full-time job. I didn’t know what RSS meant. Ijust wanted to be the first person alive to know if anything – anything at all – happened in Paris Hilton’s life, and I would havesigned up for any mailing list that could ensure that.
I used to be my target market. I am not anymore. It’s anadjustment.
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 allowsmultiple 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 aspart of the GTD and Agile communities.
My responsibility on this team is marketing. Here’s theproblem I keep seeing: Our product is by no means the best puremind-mapping app out there. If what you want to do is build mind maps for yourpersonal use, there are products on the market with sexier UIs and broaderfeature sets, products built by companies who have years-long head starts onus, full-time staff, and are not, ya know, bootstrapped.
None of these existing products allow for the real-timecollaboration available in our product. That’s our differentiator. So we keeptrying to position this product as a mind-mapping application that allowsreal-time collaboration.
Adjusting Your Market Mindset
So far, it’s not working as well as we’d hoped. I suspectthat’s because the hard-core mind-mapping market wants hard-core mind-mappingtools, and they don’t see enough value in the collaborative aspect of ourproduct to forgo some of the other features our app is lacking.
We need to figure out who our target market is. For whom isthe real-time collaboration most valuable? Is this a product for students,building outlines together in a classroom? For conference-goers workingtogether 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 ofthe established mind-mapping apps, we’ve learned we need to focus on other markets – marketsconsisting of folks who might not be hard-core mind-mappers, but who couldcertainly benefit from this collaborative functionality as they brainstorm –and think about what feature sets theyneed.
Despite our initial plan, we have built a product that, whencompared to what we consider our competition, is about collaboration first and mind-mappingsecond. Now we need to focus on features that aid in collaboration, ratherthan on features that aid in mind-mapping. If we can do that, we have thepotential to take the market by storm. It’s just not the same market we’dinitially planned to take by storm.
We are not our target market anymore.
