In my previous posts I talked about how to get information from the market through social media listening. I said that there are many more things to watch than the number of people talking negatively about something because they have a problem. Why is that?
The types of IT products
We should consider one thing. There are IT products that do not solve problems. They serve certain human needs. These desires can also be bad. It is up to the reader to decide whether the majority of social applications serve good or bad desires, but one thing is for sure, they do not solve problems, they create problems. For example, if someone wants to manage several Facebook pages, after a while it will become a problem that they will solve with social media management tools. I mean? On the one hand, it is not only by solving problems that you get many users for a product, on the other hand, it is very common that an IT solution creates 2-3 new problems. From this point of view, there are 3 types of IT tools.
1. A product that satisfies some legitimate or unnecessary human need.
2. A product that facilitates the use of a previous product.
3. A product that solves a problem.
And all of this shows that when we examine a market, it is not enough just to hear about the problems. What else do you need?
The magical plus
There has to be something in your product that makes people’s lives better. Something that gives the user something extra. The market is not always ready for that kiss. Maybe you want to automate something, but that requires users to learn a lot. They may or may not be ready for that. How many people are in a potential user market is not enough information about the market. The real information is how the members of the potential market, the future users, are able and willing to change. And here we have arrived at the most important thing to measure.
Willingness to change
Incredible as it may seem, our attitude to change determines whether we join the users of a product or not. There is a serious literature on this phenomenon. It is important to note at the outset that we do not need to speak in generalities here. The encounter with each product and each target group is different. Therefore, for almost every product, it is possible to measure in a different way whether the given market, in its given state, has enough users to turn the startup’s product into a profitable one. We will write more about this in the future. If you are interested, bookmark this article.
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