You are driving home from work, stuck in rush hour. Sweat is dripping down your forehead as you open your window to try and see what is causing bumper to bumper traffic. Annoyed, you scroll through your playlist to find your favourite song, hoping that its sweet tunes will help you forget - forget all the times you felt unappreciated by your team, sacrificing time with your family for time at the office to meet a deadline, forget that you are miserable and that growing up is seriously overrated.

Sitting back, hand on the steering wheel, you let your eyes relax and suddenly, it hits you. That feeling you get when you have just thought of something so amazing it will change your life, and your family’s life, and hundreds and thousands of people’s life. It’s a feeling so powerful and motivating that you quickly write it down and start thinking about what you need to do next to make this into a reality.

If you were a cartoon, a lightbulb would be over your head. You have an idea. And its going to change your life.

Or so you hope.

Before jumping on Google and looking for software developers in your area, it’s important to make sure that your idea is actually something that people want and will use and most importantly figure out who is going to be using it.

For the purposes of this series, we are going to build an MVP alongside with these posts, to show you progress and what to expect when going through the process. The idea: Habit app

Target Market - How do I figure out who to help

You’ve been stranded in the desert for days. It’s hot, you’re thirsty, and everywhere you look there is sand, sand, and more sand. You feel frustrated and disempowered and wonder whether you will ever be able to find your community. You turn to your left and see a faint outline in the distance.. could it be? You start sprinting towards, it hoping and praying that you find what you’re looking for. As you get closer, the faint outline starts to get bigger and bigger and you realize that it’s the village you were looking for. Everybody welcomes you with open arms and give you fresh water. It’s exactly what you needed.

Your target market refers to the people that are going to get a lot of value out of using your app. These are the people whose desires, values, and needs align the most with what your business can offer. You need to understand who they are, what motivates them, and how to best reach them. The more specific your answers, the better.

We’ve created a checklist of questions that will help you get a clearer idea for your target market and to start building a customer profile. Here is what our target market looks like for our habit tracker:

Are your assumptions correct?

We encourage you to build a survey and reach out to people in your life that might fit this criteria and ask them what they are looking for. List out all the features that you want your app to have and all the benefits that those features provide and ask them if they think they would use that feature or if they suggest something else. My challenge to you is to reach out to at least 50 people.

I can’t stress this point enough. You are not building an app for yourself. You are building it for them. Make sure that you become fluent in who they are and what do they really need. (This will save you a lot of money and headaches later in the development process)

Next time on the “What it really takes to build an MVP series”: Validating your idea: Market Validation

Sources:

https://squareup.com/ca/en/townsquare/how-to-define-analyze-your-target-market

https://www.inc.com/guides/2010/06/defining-your-target-markets.html