You're (probably) not your target market

Many years ago, my Advertising professor said something that's stuck with me ever since: "Never forget that you're not your target audience." He meant that we weren't representative of the consumers to whom we were advertising, and that something that we really liked might not work at all with our target audience, while something we hated might actually work perfectly.

The lesson applies not only to advertising, but to product and market development as well. We're rarely representative of the customers that we're trying to serve. Product features that we think are essential may be far less so to customers. On the other hand, customers may want or need something whose importance we discount.

There are, of course, counterexamples. For years, HP used a technique called "next-bench marketing": Go talk to the engineer at the next bench, and ask them what instrument, device or feature would make their job easier or more successful. Then, go build what they asked for. The engineer at the next bench was representative of a whole class of engineers at a whole lot of benches, so solving a problem for one of them solved a problem for all of them.

If you're truly representative of the customers you're targeting, then by all means use next-bench marketing to figure out what products or services to make. But be sure that you're not making assumptions about customers that you don't fully understand. The best way is to actually go out and talk to them. Find out their pain points. Let them not only tell you, but show you, how they live and work. You're likely to find out that some of your hypotheses are dead on, and others are way off base. By talking to customers, you can spend more time developing products and services that have a real market, and less time pivoting away from products that "seemed like a good idea at the time."

Startups: Quick and Dirty or Built to Last?

Several years ago, I rented a small house on the San Francisco Bay peninsula. The landlord was a very nice person, but she didn't want to spend a penny more than she had to for anything. In the mid-90's, she built a large house and installed the cheapest double-pane windows she could find. Typically, good windows that are properly installed last at least 25 years, but most of the internal vapor seals on the windows that she installed had broken in less than 10 years. The result was moisture and fogging between the panes that was impossible to remove. She was thinking about selling the house and knew that she could never get a good price with those windows, so she had to replace all of them.

There are times when you should spend money now in order to avoid having to spend more money later; the windows in that house are a good example. By installing good-quality windows when the house was built, the landlord could have avoided the hassle and expense of replacing them a few years later. However, there are also times when it's appropriate to spend the least amount possible building a "disposable" solution.

Software and Internet services startups have to make this same choice all the time: Spend a lot of money up front to get high-quality code that can be used for a long time, or go the cheap and dirty route and get something out that works but will have to be replaced quickly?  The answer depends on what stage your startup is in. If you're just getting started and you're still trying to determine if the opportunity you've targeted is real and your technical solution will work, cheap and dirty is best. You're almost certainly going to throw out your code once, if not multiple times, before you're got the right product/market fit. Once you've got your product/market fit right, you can begin replacing "temporary" code with higher-quality, more maintainable code (I hesitate to say "permanent". because no code should be permanent.)

There are always situations where getting it right the first time is essential, especially in applications used for mission-critical or life-and-death situations. However, for most early-stage startups, cheap and dirty is the way to go, at least at the beginning.