How to Develop a Product Your Customers Actually Want to Buy

How to ask your tribe the right question to get the right answer

I worked six months on a writer’s block course no one bought. Well, three people, but we’ll call it no one. As an entrepreneur I thought it was my job to lead the innovation — to go out into the world, find a problem, and solve it for a hungry group of people.

I thought if I solved the problem I’d have no problem selling my course.

Here it was — writer’s block. This mythical problem that affects many writers who face blank pages and become frozen with inaction. I thought I’d done my homework. I hadn’t. I made the classic mistake.

I build my product first and looked for a customer second.

I tried to find writers to buy my course, but they had no interest. No amount of well-crafted copywriting could convince anyone they needed my course. Had I known then what I know now about product development, my course would’ve looked much different.

My course format was wrong.

My message was wrong.

My entire problem was the wrong problem.

My target market wasn’t even a market.

I spent hundred of hours creating a product no one wanted. Had I done the right work beforehand, my product would’ve looked very different.

When we look to serve a certain market, it’s critical we understand our purpose in the process. Our customers don’t really want our product. They want to solution/experience/transformation our product brings.

How to create a product your customers are willing to buy:

-Build an email list of the first 1,000 people you wish to serve

If you want create a business that serves you for life, you’ve got to own your customer list. When we start with our first 1,000 people, we build a product testing lab, through which we’ll test and build a big offer for a bigger pool of customers.

Once you uncover your test product you offer it to your first 1,000 subscribers. Their response will help tweak the final product. We’ll use paid advertising to sell the final product on a larger scale, once we’ve got a predictable success.

We send them our minimum viable product and ask them where we missed and where we hit. If we miss, we go back and fix the product.

-Ask them what they don’t want

If we ask our customers what they want, they’ll steer us in the wrong direction. We can’t put the product development on our audience. The development is our job. We’ve got to decipher the true problem and show our audience the path to a solution.

We’ll use our email list to ask our customers everything they don’t want from their current situation. We don’t survey them with long, multiple-choice spreadsheets. Instead, we email them simple questions and ask that they reply manually.

We look for the hidden answers behind the long responses. We combine similar responses together and look for eighty-percent solutions.

We develop eighty-percent solutions.

Not everyone on your email list will have the same problem. However, once you dissect your survey responses you can tease out an eighty-percent solution. This is a solution that will serve eighty-percent of your customers. There’s enough overlap to serve the most people with a single idea. We’re specific, but not too specific.

-Look at what they’re already paying for

Check your market. How much are similar products selling for? What’s the premium and the discount version selling for? Not all markets are equal.

You may be able to charge $5,000 for a course in sales, but no one in the scrap-booking niche will pay that much. Perhaps you’ve built some proprietary software for non-profits. You better make sure non-profits will have the budget to afford your offering.

Try not to be the first one in your niche. Be the first with your solution, but don’t invent a problem that didn’t exist before. You’ll put yourself in the education business and not the marketing business. The road will be much longer.

-Sell a transformation, not a product

We don’t buy products. We buy the transformation we receive. We buy the end result. There’s an old copywriting phrase “your customer doesn’t want a one-inch drill bit. She wants one-inch holes.” Too many entrepreneurs try to sell the drill.

When we package our product as a transformation from the current situation (pre-purchase) to the transformation (post-purchase), now we’ve got an offer that gets attention.

Look at all the before/after photos for weight loss and exercise products. When we can show the prospect how we’ll transform her from her current situation, to her future result, you’ll have a much easier time making the sale. We want to build “shut up and take my money” products, not hard-sells.

-Add only the features needed for the transformation

Remember, we buy the end result, not the product. If I can pay $500 for a one-sentence recipe, guaranteed to give me the result I want, I’ll pay it.

When we pad our product with dozens of unnecessary features, we water-down the experience. Maybe turn the prospect away. If your product takes six months to consume before delivering the intended transformation, you’ve got too many features.

When we start with the right question we get the right answer

Our customers need us to be innovative. We crave innovation. But no one will buy a solution to a problem they don’t want to solve. There are a lot of problems we aren’t willing to pay to solve.

When you build a small list first, ask them what they don’t want, then give them a transformational solution, you’ll create a product with a more-predictable sales ratio.

When you’re ready to pay for advertising, you’ll have a product with guaranteed sales, not guesswork. Everyone benefits in the end. The customer gets a better result with little fluff. You get predictable sales without wasting effort building a product no one wants.

We’re waiting for you.

(Enroll in My Free Email Masterclass: Get Your First 1,000 Subscribers)

August Birch (AKA the Book Mechanic) is both a fiction and non-fiction author from Michigan, USA. A self-proclaimed guardian of writers and creators, August teaches indie authors how to write books that sell and how to sell more of those books once they’re written. When he’s not writing or thinking about writing August carries a pocket knife and shaves his head with a safety razor.

This story is published in The Startup, Medium’s largest entrepreneurship publication followed by +443,678 people.

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