Growth Hacking for Product-Market Fit: How to Find and Target Your Ideal Customer

“The only thing that matters is getting to product/market fit.” - Marc Andreessen

Hey. Matt here.

Last time, we discussed branding.

Today, it’s about product-market fit as well as targeting your ideal customer.

Straight to it. No fluff. To the value.

“*Sigh* You’re going to explain what this stuff is and why it’s important, right?”

Yup. And it’s everything but boring. Trust me.

So, the proper way to define growth hacking is that it is a data-driven, innovative, and often unconventional approach to marketing and business growth.

What does that mean?

Trying different approaches and experimenting to achieve scalable results.

“What’s PMF again?”

When your product meets market demand. That’s what product-market fit is.

So, before you go into developing new features and running all these ad campaigns and doing all this amazing stuff…

Understand the steps you can follow to find your PMF.

So, there are five things here.

The first one: Finding the problem, the solution, and your audience.

What are you solving? How are you doing it? Who will you do it for?

This is where you define things generally.

So, a problem could be that "there is a lack of a one-size-fits-all E-com store management app.”

Your solution could be “ Manage all your E-com stores from one simple easy-to-use app.”

Your audience? People with multiple E-com stores.

However, when defining your audience, think about how much they’ll use it, and what value it provides to them.

For example, someone who uses social media apps might use them a lot, but the apps don’t exactly solve a pressing problem.

However, for someone using a ride-hailing app, they might use it infrequently, but it’s of great value to them as they get a ride when they need it the most.

So, ideally, you’d want both things to be high. However, if it’ll be either used a lot or solve a pressing problem, that’s good as well.

Defining this will help niche down on the relevant audience.

For example, if you’re building a real estate buying-and-selling app, normal consumers might not use it a lot but might get a lot of value from it.

However, if you focus on real estate agents, you could end up with both factors having a high score.

Similarly, it’s important to do this to figure out who your audience is.

Next step: Make the most of what you have.

In the initial stages, you generally won’t have many resources or much funding to work with. However, make do with what you have.

Figure out what solutions exist that can help you build your service or app as well as if it’s been tried before.

If so, was it successful? What are you doing that’s different?

If not, why? There might be lessons for you to learn what NOT to do or what to do differently.

Now, the pivotal stage: Build an MVP.

A minimum viable product is just that: as bare as possible, while still having the core functionality.

Try doing this:

• Define your core features and stick to them. Don’t focus on having things such as fancy icons, nice color gradients, and optimized UI. That’s not the point here.
• Build it fast. Have a quick turnaround time so that, if there are any problems, they can be fixed quickly. The goal here is to see if what you’re doing works, not to start developing the final product just yet.
• Identify relevant people who could be your potential customers and get it in front of them.
• Gather feedback from a small group of people who are relevant to your product. Not investors, friends, but people that have USED the product. Those are the people who’ll give you worthwhile feedback.

You also need some numbers to gauge your progress, right? Find your metrics.

The key thing to do here is to avoid vanity metrics at all costs. Things like downloads are irrelevant if compared to more tangible and important metrics like user retention and usage of what you’ve built.

You need to know how things are going.?

If you’re making any progress.

If you’re moving forward.

These two metrics will provide you with the best insights in the initial stages.

Finally, Have a quick and amazing release cycle.

Speed is the key to success here.

Follow this 7-point process to make your cycle quick and easy, while getting the most out of it:

1. Brainstorm with your team and make sure all ideas are heard, even if they don’t get implemented. Never hurts to hear people out, especially when it’s the people building with you. This should take an hour or two, tops.
2. After selecting the important things and features you’ll be considering, give each a difficulty score, from zero to ten. This score tells how hard it is to implement that feature.
3. Now, determine the priority of those features and ideas.
4. Specify each of them. Clearly define how each of those ideas will look like.
5. Build it.
6. Release it
7. Review how it all went.

There. 5 Steps. From Problem/Solution to iterating and improving. Now, a bit on Growth hacking and your ideal customer.

All of these steps are important if you’re looking to develop, build or introduce something that will have some value and importance, as well as convert.

However, you should also be focusing a bit on the people on the receiving end.

Your potential customers.

Your target market.

Your audience.

They’re the ones that will potentially be showing interest in your product.

They’re going to be the ones paying and using your service.

They’re the ones who’ll talk about your solution.

They’re the people you’re going to be helping.

Focus on them.

By the way, there’s a difference between your target audience and your target market.

Your target audience is going to be the ones making the purchase or buying into your product or service.

However, your target market is the people who’ll be using it.

Most of the time, they’re both the same.

However, when it comes to something like toys, children might be your target audience.

However, your target market will be the parents buying the toys for their children.

So, yeah.

And then there’s growth hacking…

Once you’ve covered your bases here, you can focus on trying to get:

More people in the know about what you’re doing.

more people onboarded.

More people are interested.

From running scroll-stopping mediocre-looking ads that are a pattern-interrupt to asking your existing customer base the right questions, once you’ve got the right strategy nailed down, it’s all about growth, feedback, and improvement.

From trying out different pricing strategies and integration of unique features to asking different segments of your customers different questions to get different angles of your product, it’s all just about trying different things with a high potential to drive success.

Oh, and don’t get overwhelmed by those steps.

The most important thing is to get started.

Instead of getting caught up in:

How you’re going to ensure your customers stay.

how you’ll deal with the competitors.

How critical the feedback will be.

If it’ll even work.

Just get started.

Start with the problem, solution, and audience, and go from there.

Simple.

Not easy though. Takes quite some effort.

It’s a wrap then?

This one was a bit different.

I mean, you’ve got all of these things on setting up a business, building out the right features, targeting an audience.

However, it’s nice to try and do all of these things when you’ve got a lot of money to experiment with.

When all you have is a limited budget and a burning desire to bring something to market, it can be quite overwhelming, just looking at the competitors.

So, yeah.

Don’t get overwhelmed, experiment, and, most of all, target the right person.

It’s highly likely that, if you’re running into issues, you’re simply not directing things toward the right people.

The people that matter.

The people that you can help.

Anyways, as usual, if you’d like me to help out with anything, just let me know and I’ll be more than happy to look over things with you.

Keep building,