Getting Beyond Beta: Understand Your Audience
You’ve launched a product (or at least a beta version). Through some canny combination of SEO, advertising, or word of mouth, you’ve got a small audience of people who know who you are and what your product is.
Logically, that audience – the population of people who are aware of you – is going to break down into three groups.
Current and future customers. If they’re not already using your product, it’s just a matter of time until they do. It solves their problem and they’re ready and willing to take on the cost (whether measured in dollars, resources, or learning curve.)
Uncomfortable prospective customers. There’s something preventing this group from becoming customers. Maybe it’s something very concrete like pricing or lack of a specific feature, or maybe it’s something they can’t quite put their finger on. Unless you remove the hurdle in their way, they’re unlikely to become customers. If they do, it will be with some reluctance.
Non-customers. Your product doesn’t solve their problem. Or it does, but they’re unyieldingly opposed to change, spending money, or trying new things. You can’t add features or lower prices to tempt them; only time or a deux ex machina mandate to use your product will change their minds.
If you’ve read Crossing the Chasm, this may sound suspiciously like the technology adoption lifecycle curve: 
And it is. Where I’m concerned is with the labeling of the groups: “innovators”, “early adopters”, “early majority”, “late majority”, “laggards”.
It suggests that certain populations just aren’t ready to use your product – as though that was a personal failing of theirs rather than a shortcoming of the product. Most products organizations already identify more with the innovator/early adopter population than the mainstream. Naturally! We love technology, that’s why we’re working elbows-deep in it. And that makes it very tempting to disregard feedback from people who aren’t “like us”, or to forget that they’re even there at all…
<– Most companies I’ve worked for or with think their audience breakdown looks something like this.
<– But what if it actually looks like this?
Coming up next: How we discovered our “pie” was out of whack, and how you move on from there.
