Let’s face it, it’s hard enough to come up with a solution to problems that people actually want to pay for and keep using. And to be honest, not a lot of startups would have a product that the market wants.
So, how do you know your product would create demand or have product/marketing fit?
READ: Digital Marketing For Small Businesses: What is Digital Marketing?
You know that you have product/market fit when your product is on the mind of your users at minimum, once every week and they are happily telling others about it as well. This is the holy grail of the startup life, where founders simply add reiterations to their product to keep users excited, while they go from graduation seminars to lectures, giving glamorized speeches about how being an entrepreneur takes hard work and resilience.
Here, I’ll share with you how to get product/market fit.
1. Create a Minimum Viable Product Prototype(MVPP)
It’s important to know how your product would perform before you start developing it. Collect information for your actual product by studying a simple but functional pre-market version of it.
Here’s how to create an MVPP that works and delivers the data you need to perfect your product:
Beta-release: Beta-releases are versions of your product that only a handful of your customer gets to use in order to provide feedback that you’ll then use to perfect the final product. Beta-releases are mainly used to gather feedback.
READ: Deciding on the Right Content for Your Next Product Launch
Prototyping on Paper (POP): POP is commonly used in software development, it is a technique used for testing and assessing interfaces.
3D Printing: 3D designs can be modeled to look like the actual product, which you can interact with and document its behavior.
2. Study Your Target Market
Conducting a study on your target market to understand what motivates their behavior can give you an advantage. While most startups already have a predefined concept of what their product would look like, to get an advantage, conduct research and try to understand what they actually want before you begin to design your product.
Studying your target marketing means you’re not going to start convincing users on the benefits of your product. You’ve seen that they actually need it. What you need to do is put it in their hands. See some approaches to successfully study your target market and get valuable practical knowledge of what they actually want:
Surveys: With surveys, you’ll elicit information about what your potential users want from your product directly. You can incorporate their feedback into your product to have product/market fit.
READ: 5 Ways to Target B2b Audiences on Social Media
Feedback from your competitor’s existing users can be used to create features that your competitors’ products have, and drive their customer base to your side.
3. Improve Customer Experience
In some cases, all you need to do to have product/market fit is to actually give your users the perfect customer experience. People love products that are easy to use and it becomes almost a part of their lives.
To create improvements that will add value to your users, you need to first identify areas they may be experiencing pain with your product. This can be easily detected as in most cases your users would always communicate to your their things they don’t like about your product.
Work on those aspects and deliver an improved customer experience for them
4. Analyze and Optimize Needed Areas
In most cases, all you need is to analyze your users’ interaction and usage of your app and use findings to optimize the performance of critical areas.
To get proper data to understand what areas to improve on, I’d recommend you include the following tools in your arsenal:
Google Analytics: Use Google analytics to study the sources of your users and their behavior when they’re using your product.
Crazyegg: Study where your users spend the most time on through visualizations in heatmaps.
Conclusion
With the strategies outlined in this article, you should be on an easier path to having product/market fit. How do you plan to make your product hold and retain the market?
