5 Important Answers Your Potential Startup Buyers Can Give You

Imagine taking a job where your only responsibility is to turn an idea written on a piece of paper into a company with a successful product and happy customers. Everything in between is for you to figure out. You have no roadmapbusiness plan, connections, or anything that can bring clarity to your role.

That’s your job as a startup founder giving birth, nurturing and growing something out of nothing. And it can be very confusing and mentally challenging. There are always many unanswered questions and even when you have answers, they’re not always the right answers. 

Yes, you can look at the competition, ask mentors and advisors, but no one will have a better answer than the people who will pull money out of their pocket to buy and use your solution. Here are five important questions you can answer just by speaking with your potential customers.

1. Are We Wasting Our Time?

Doubt and uncertainty are a painful part of the startup journey. As entrepreneurs, we’re risk and action takers. Often, many of our actions and initiatives can feel ineffective, leading us to ask, are we wasting our time?

Our potential customers is the first group to help us answer this question. They won’t tell us how to spend our resources to maximize output, but they will tell us if the solution we are working on is worth the investment in the first place.

2. What Is The Opportunity?

A study of the competition and the gaps in their value proposition can give us an indication of the market opportunity. But to truly understand the deeply felt and unsolved problems that our target customers are facing, we need to talk to them. 

It’s challenging to build a successful startup product without clearly understanding the problem we are solving. Today’s buyers may be using a competing solution for more than one reason. There may be more than one segment with similar needs, yet have different expectations. If we look closely, the problem may be the same, but the urgency of the need for all of the various buyers can be different. This is one of the most important answers that can be found from speaking with our future buyers.

3. What Should We Build?

A problem can be solved in many ways. Building different solutions and testing which product best solves the problem is not an option. However, speaking with future buyers about their needs, expectations and challenges with existing solutions can help us start on a stronger foundation. 

Potential users can help us define product features and functionality, user experience and interface, cost and essentially, everything about the solution they want to use and will happily pay for. Building a customer advisory board can accelerate this feedback loop.

4. Who Is The Ideal Buyer?

Assume you have two customers, both paying the full price of your product. However, the first customer takes 50% more of your customer support time and cancels their membership or business relationship with your startup five months sooner than the second customer. Both customers are making you money and both need your solution.

In this simplistic scenario, the first customer is not necessarily the wrong buyer. It’s the second customer who seems to be a better fit. This customer costs you less to acquire and support while making bigger margins.

Approach your efforts for identifying your ideal buyer just like any other investment you make in your startup because the moment you learn who they are, the more money you will make over the long-run and the less time you spend on retention and support. Speaking with potential customers is the first and most important step because with the insights you gain, you can make and test educated hypotheses through experiments and campaigns.

5. How Do We Find Them?

With a quick Google search, you can find over fifty customer acquisition channels that you can use to attract customers. What if you knew the best channel for your startup and customers? Identifying your highest converting customer acquisition channel means you can focus on what will bring you more of your ideal customers for less effort and money.

Identifying this channel also requires data that you can gather from tests and experiments. However, just like finding your ideal buyer, everything starts with hypotheses and the more you know about your customers, the more likely your hypotheses will turn out valid. Asking your future buyers where they spend most of their time and how they heard about their current solution is a big step forward.

In conclusion, every entrepreneur has to deal with uncertainty. Actively involving your future customers in decision making, especially in the beginning, can bring clarity to your journey and confidence in your decisions.

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