Marketing your product starts way before you are ready to launch. In fact, in most cases it should start before you begin design and development. I think that the lack of doing this is why so many start ups don’t even remotely resemble the company they launched as 24 months after launch. They often find that the product or service they came out with misses the mark. If the start up survives it is because those initial customers came back and said, “what you have done is only minimally interesting, but if you were to change it like this…it would be really valuable”.
Now don’t get me wrong, this is perhaps a viable start up strategy. The only problem with it is that it tends to burn time and dollars in a very ineffective way. It would be much less expensive in both time and dollars to test the market using marketing tools than completed product! (how many entrepreneurs do you think really do this though? not many i’ll bet. They are too eager to start coding or pouring cement…as the case may be.)
So, here is the upshot. If you are 70% of the way to your product and haven’t done the market research, start doing it. If you are thinking about starting a product development, stop and do the market research first. If you think that the market research sounds too hard and laborious, it is. But it will pay off in the end.
Before I go on about how to do market research, in my next blog, I will talk about what you need to do before doing the market research.
