I appreciated this tweet from Andy Johns (Former Wealthfront, Quora, Twitter, Facebook):
When it comes to the question of the target customer, the most common mistake is the target customer definition is too broad. It must be almost comically narrow to the point where you may be misunderstood for such a narrow focus. A few examples to illustrate...
— Andy Johns (@ibringtraffic) May 8, 2020
I couldn't agree more and wanted to add a couple of thoughts:
Driving Word of Mouth
Driving word of mouth is critical in the early growth days of any product. The way you drive word of mouth is by delivering a 10X experience. The way you deliver a 10X experience early with very limited resources is by constraining your target audience.
Scope → Access → Filter → Success Signal → Leverage → Repeat
A comically narrow audience to maximize growth is counter-intuitive for most people. The thinking usually goes, "the more people that try the product, the better the chance for growth." But its the opposite. In How To Launch a Product or Feature To Maximize Growth I detailed out how to think about a repeatable launch process:
Scope - Define a very specific audience hypothesis.
Access - Figure out how you are going to access that audience.
Filter - Filter for that audience during sign up.
Success Signal - Gather feedback and data that shows signals of success.
Leverage - Leverage it out to the next adjacent audience.
Cycles through this loop should lead you to expand into adjacent audiences. You can think about it as layers of concentric circles. Understanding these order of operations is key.
Having the restraint to do this is very difficult. Companies I've seen do this well recently are Superhuman, Grain, Roam Research, and Clubhouse.
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