Why bother researching your audience

In the last couple of years, I met many entrepreneurs with very cool ideas. I always enjoy talking to enthusiastic people who want to bring ambitious ideas to life. It really inspires me!

So I get very surprised when I meet them a few months later and they tell me they gave up on their ideas. Actually surprise it's not the right word, I guess it's more sadness to see such potential not being realized.

I tried to understand the reasons why this happens. Of course, there are many factors involved, but I realized that there is one big problem these entrepreneurs have in common: they don't have a clear target in mind.

It happened to me too. When I first started thinking of The BD School, I had a lot of ideas and I was very convinced of most of them. But, when I started asking questions to other business developers I realized I had a lot of wrong assumptions.

So I knew that the first thing we needed to do was user research. Our goal was to produce useful content that could help other business developers move forward. It only made sense to ask them directly what they wanted to know more about.

By following a simple process we made sure to remove all our assumptions and start creating content that was truly helpful to our audience. Over the months we received many messages from business developers who managed to improve their work thanks to us.

And that's what really matters.

Whatever you want to create, you must create it to serve a purpose. Big or small. And the only way to find out if you have one is by asking questions and listen carefully!

You can read more about our user research process here.