People advice me to just go ahead and do businesses and learn from the mistakes, I think it’s just plain stupid to invest on things where I don’t even know who I’m going sell products to. What is your opinion about this?
It’s better to get good advice. Hire a consultant.
YES! Market researcher here. Always do your work to understand potential customers and the market beforehand.
I have seen too many people create with no idea who they would sell to! Like their customers were suddenly going to appear out of thin air. Don’t waste your time and energy with ‘hit and miss’.
SO many people on these subs complaining they can’t get work, leads or customers, but they didn’t even check if anyone was interested.
Can’t help them at that point…
I agree with you, but here is the thing. How do you check if a product or service will be popular without actually delivering it?
Easy. You deep dive into problems, drivers and behaviour. You test various solutions on the market and potential solutions. We did this work for companies for years.
I think it’s just plain stupid to invest on things where I don’t even know who I’m going sell products to.
I have asked more than three hundred projects, posting their problems here, about doing the market learning their chosen method demands. While some admitted they knew they skipped the smoke test, none conducted it.
There were gray area exceptions. One guy got two customers pre-launch, rushed through launch, then spent the next Two Years getting ten more. This dozen he called proof of product-market fit.
Looking back on it, I guess he was right. I certainly had a fit right then and there.
Half is just “Oh you wacky Internet.” Ninety percent is interesting. One hundred percent non-compliance isn’t a fluke – that’s purposeful decision. Now the question is can anybody ever choose to follow the instructions at all?
Keep in mind this was and is a very popular book and method. A whole lot of people see the biggest problem and roadblock to success staring back from a mirror. People will run out of money long before they run out of lame excuses – not one is an excuse for why they didn’t start.
Deny it, ignore the market, make believe you do something else, online or offline, it’s Build It And They Will Come pure and simple. Stupid doesn’t come close to describing it – it’s a failure cult – a business cargo cult. The ongoing proof of Dunning-Kruger.
For entrepreneurs spewing about their love of freedom: Do You Have Any Choice Whatsoever? Because we can see the default advice posted right here. We know where the lemming migration is headed. And anyone who chooses too can acknowledge more businesses fail than succeed. Choose wisely.
How To Crash Your Startup is the popular bastardization, the default setting of all the popular advice you will get here. Top voted. Wantrepreneur approved.
My product validation is completely different then real results. Advice? Plenty object, use the proper terminology – it changes nothing.
Customer Development versus Product Development is the theory. 3 Awesome Minimum Viable Products is application. Notice how it is exactly opposite of launch first, ask questions later doctrine being ladled out, day-in and day-out.
Let’s Talk About Popups … because if I don’t tell you about a hot trend turned best practice offline … nobody here will. It may have a different name, but the advice is clearly Smoke Test Before MVP. Restaurants are one of the most risky, costly, failure prone ventures. Check out posts here; if even one person wanting to start a sit-down restaurant is even cognizant of this popular, well-known, industry standard practice. Then come to your own conclusions.
Our Dangerous Obsession With The MVP I refer to the popular bastardization as “em-vee-pee.” There are no excuses – we’re not talking about ignorance – this is deliberate.
Building An MVP Is Like Serving Burnt Pizza – don’t serve burnt pizza. In contrast, the popular advice here is you should launch something so bad it makes you cringe.
There’s no way to learn coding without ever writing a program
There’s no way to learn electronics without ever building a cricuit
You won’t ever make anything “entrepreneuring” if you don’t entrepreneur,
There are like 1000000 things you need to be able to do properly, if you keep waiting until you are confortable with 1 thing before moving on to the next, you can go on for your whole life without ever launching. Most people are stuck there, waiting for whatever misterious things.
When you need to master a thousand things you can’t expect in any reasonable way to master all of them before starting. You need to learn the minimum acceptable proficiency at those skills while doing your business and improve skills that are holding you back continuously. You build upon that, you don’t master useless skills, you don’t master skills that are “useful” but aren’t brining any value to you. You certaintly don’t spend your most valuable asset : time not bringing any value to you.
bla bla, learning isn’t wasted time, bla bla … Then why aren’t phd in economy or business not the most successful people on earth ? because it’s worthless to learn/master a skill without any way to use your skills, you’d rather learn the skill “create more opportunities” so that you lack of every other skills is compensated by the “other opportunities”
The most valuable skill of entrepreneurship is either resilience or “opportunity finder”, be either staying alive or always finding life. Those are skills that you only learn through practical means. If you have any of those you are probably already a successful entrepreneur.
There’s a good book called “Good to Great”. In it they point out that loads of companies get started, many get to a sustainable profitability, but only a few break out and become really big. So, they checked into what could be learned from the breakouts.
Most of them run small experiments and then scale. They refer to it as “Fire bullets, then cannonballs”. Basically, try something small, see if it makes money. Refine it and try it a little bigger. Refine it and try it a little bigger. Once you’ve got the process down and you know you’ve got a winner, fire the big cannonball and go all in.
- Choose your market
- Know their problems or challenges
- Create the product or skill that will help them to overcome their problems or challenges
I believe it’s crucial for you to do market research but I understand where your question is coming from. Being a sole entrepreneur or even with a small team, you might not have the budget to do a full blown market research even I struggled with our question before starting my business but I would suggest you to at-least know about the TAM,SAM &SOM even from a top down approach and also have an idea of the competitors product and pricing because this gives you a clear idea about the market you want to capture and where you are headed. I would advice for you to also consider the porters five forces to test the long term strategic effectiveness of the business. These are basic efforts in market research you have to do or else you would be heavily underprepared affecting your cost metrics as well as your sale metrics because at the end of the every deviation in plan will affect the operational cost resulting in hurting the net profit of your business. This also gives you a fair chance to see if the capital you are planning to employ is at least 2x to 3x above the government bond yield for the risk you are taking. Hence you can decide if the business is feasible to start or not.
Big fat yes. Don’t waste your time and energy doing something without knowing a thing or two. Not understanding your target market to just go all in is like throwing a rock in the middle of the ocean. It’s the most important thing to consider before starting a business. Not knowing your target market means bigger risk of failing unless you have super powers to turn the world upside down. Here’s one good read to understand more about target market. Hope it helps! https://www.cuppa.so/post/the-ultimate-guide-to-mastering-client-acquisition-2023
You should “go in” to understand the market. Everything else is theories and assumptions.
I don’t think people mean to blindly start a business that you have no idea about. What they mean is that you can never have all the answers and so you just need to start and figure out stuff along the way. It doesn’t matter how old a business is, you’ll still have new issues to deal with. It’s impossible to know everything before you start. There is always risk involved. It’s up t you to minimize that risk as much as possible by being well-prepared.
Is it better to buy a black car or a white car? Is it better to live on the beach or in the mountains? Is it better to rent or buy? Is it better lift weights or run? It’s context dependent based on the relative cost to you and the potential opportunity costs of a particular market. It’s impossible to give useful feedback without context.
If you’re opening a restaurant somewhere you better know that there will be food traffic or have a way of exposing yourself to customers who would be interested. If you are creating 14,000 random drugs a year to see what they do then you don’t need a target market you just need enough resources to sustain the failures.