You probably already have some ideas for products. As you work in a space, spending time building an Audience and Tribe this is very natural. You’ll start to see other products in the space as well as tap into what people are interested in.
Hold your horses for just a moment though. We’re going to use all of that learning but funnel it through a product development process that ensures there is a market for what we build.
The worst feeling is spending months building a product only to release it and…no-one cares!
Instead we’re going to roll back and start right at the beginning. We need our product to solve a problem - it’s a vital first step that many people miss.
They just build something they think is cool and hope for the best.
Instead we need to find out what problems our customers actually have and then construct products to solve these problems.
Doing so will make our lives a lot easier, even if it requires more upfront work now.
How do we work out what problems we need to solve?
We ask!
We have to ask our Audience and Tribe and gauge their reactions.
Let’s get into that process.
First up, when asking potential customers we don’t want to be too broad.
We can’t (unfortunately) just ask “what product would you buy?” Life would be a lot easier if we could!
We can’t even ask “what are your biggest problems?”.
People won’t take the time to answer this question as it requires too much time for them.
Instead we need to be more specific and offer examples to help them answer.
Here’s the prompt:
Act as a market research expert.
Generate a set of questions to elicit a potential customer's biggest problems. These problems will be solved by my product.
The product serves the [topic] niche.
Give me 10 questions, each with 4 alternative answers, that I can use in polls to elicit their true problems.
I used “AI in business” as my niche topic.
These are 2 out of the 10 questions generated. ChatGPT will create lots of questions about different areas of your topic area.
Go ahead and take these polls to X. One or two per day maximum - spread them out!
Continuously and frequently survey your audience to start to hone in on their problem areas. If you see certain answers don’t come up much you can start to ignore these in future questions.
Continue to do this until you’ve begun to hone in on their actual problems. Start collecting these problem areas together in a document.
For example, over time I might find that the following problems come up again and again in my niche: lack of money, not knowing where to start and unclear ROI (return on investment).
Keep note as we’ll be using these problems in the next step. These problem areas are the fertile soil that we’ll be growing products from.