Educating Your Audience: Challenges for a Startup
There are a couple of ways to approach the market. Do your research, do some surveys and determine if your market will accept your new product. This often makes sense. After all, the premise is that you should see if there's a market need before you build your product/solution.
A common implementation of this method is when retail food companies do surveys and find out that consumers want to eat healthier. The challenge comes when consumers don't buy the new healthy choices on the menu. Or worst, because the healthy choice often costs more to produce, consumers won't pay the extra fees associated with the healthy choice. Just cause they say on a survey they want something, doesn't actually mean they want it.
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| Jibao Blog |
Another common method is to build a product, widget, or cool feature, hoping that it'll be something people want. Too often this is the engineer's method. Build something cool and "they will come."
There's no absolute right or wrong way to go about this. The only question is what happens when your audience doesn't know that it needs your product? \
For example, if I was to ask you four or five years ago I could give you a viewing screen size of 3" x 2" and tell you, you could watch all of your favorite television shows on this small screen, you'd tell me that you don't need it. If I was to add that this tiny screen was to cost about 700 USD, you'd tell me I was nuts. 4 or 5 years ago, you'd probably spend such a sum on a giant LCD screen to better view your television shows. That said, many people currently sport smartphones with small screens and watch entire television shows while they commute each and every day. Sometimes, even taken to lying in bed to watch the show, hoping to not let the smartphone hit them in the face when it slips from their hand. And they easily spend 700 USD for a new fancy hand held device.
So what to do? You may opt to try educating your audience one at a time, one blog at a time. Such is the method that Jibao Map System has adopted. Besides meeting teachers one-on-one, they also having been curating articles for their target audience. In this process, they're trying to add value for the Taiwanese high school teacher without just "hocking" a product. See Jibao Viewer Blog Give it a try. Who knows, you may not even know that you need Jibao until you've tried it.
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