Finding your target audience

The biggest task of the product manager is to find your target audience.

Typically it is a very tight rope walk.

You define it too narrowly and you would struggle to generalize the product later.

You define it too broad and you would struggle to satisfy a lot of people and the product might not take off at all.

There is this awesome post by Dave Mcclure on why Niche target segment works. Blog link here.

What he says is mostly right and that is what we did as well. We did it mostly by accident. We had to define our niche because we could only talk to those kind of retailers and get data from them to start developing the data.

It did have its upside. We were very clear on what we wanted to develop and we are slowly talking to retailers and adding more scenarios. As we are doing this, we are also talking to a slightly different set of retailers.

This helps us incrementally build our product while also generalizing the existing features.

In our case, we did not find our target audience. They found us.

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