For those of you who are not familiar with the term Product Market but are with the Indiana Jones Movies (showing my age) this is every startups Holy Grail!
It is essentially what we are all trying to achieve when we start a new business that has no established business model or customer base. It’s the point where you have created a new product and you have found a market that is willing to use your product on an ongoing basis.
The reason this is so hard is due to the fact that when you create a brand new service or solution that you want people to use you need to be able to; find them, educate them about your product get them to signup and get them to keep using your product.
This sounds easy but is incredibly hard to do because essentially we are all creatures of habit.
The habits we have today have been created over our entire lifetime and have been influenced by a number of factors but these habits together form a routine that we generally adhere to. In order to then make sure your product is a sustainable business you need to become a new habit of your customer.
Now try and think back to that last time you tried to change a bad habit or create a new good habit. Why didn’t it work? What were the reasons to you not succeeding? There are many excuses why they might not of worked but in the end you didn’t try hard enough because either the outcome wasn’t beneficial enough or the pain you were trying to overcome wasn’t high enough.
There is a point where if the pain or the gain was high enough you would of kept going and succeed but that point wasn’t reached.
Our job as entrepreneurs is to be able to find a pain and create a solution that ultimately becomes a habit.
Action you can Take:
Here is a new habit you can try create. Every time you feel a pain in something you do on a regular basis why not right it down and think a bit more deeply about the problem. Think about how painful it is to you and start talking to your friends or colleagues to see if they have the same pain. Then start brainstorming a manual non-tech solution that you could actually run yourself. Go back to those people that had a same pain and see if you were able to solve their pain how would they rate your solution on a scale of “Must Have”, “Nice to Have” or “Don’t Care”. If you can consistently find people who “Must Have” your solution you are on the first steps to creating a sustainable product and business.