Have you become over-obsessed with tracking investors down and trying to get money for your startup? Do you feel like you have users, and numbers to show, but investors seem skeptical of your approach?
Are people using your product, or are they paying you to use your product?
This is a critical piece of knowledge a founder has to figure out, before he or she can lead a product into the transformation into a big business. Investors won't talk to you if you can't figure this out.
“People using a product are users,” says Andy Cheng, CEO of foundi 房地資訊站. “People paying you are customers.”
Andy has faced this situation himself. An early engineer at Google in Taiwan, he left in 2013 and launched a map product he had made at Google, because he thought it would be a great business.
Andy soon learned he had built a feature. People looking for real estate listings in Taiwan would visit his map, "But they didn't stay. They ended up going back to the agents to talk," he says.
Andy had not built for customers, he says. He didn't really have a product. Since then, he has come up with a basic process for building products that customers will pay for -- build a tool that empowers them.
1. Find people who, without technology, are experiencing a huge dilemma in getting things done.
2. Build for these people by finding out what this pain point is, and refine your product until they are willing to pay you when you solve this pain for them. Please them.
3. Take what you learn from those customers and improve your product even more.
4. Find the next set of new customers, who will pay you even more for a more refined product.
It turned out, Andy had to talk to real estate agents who competed with each other for listings, not to the people who wanted to buy or sell a house.
He built them a tool that helped them find the exact information they needed to secure a listing.
Tapping into this innate competition culture led to scale and network effects. That led to profitability.
“Most founders don’t know the [customer’s] pain point,” he says. “Be down to earth. The obvious things have already been done. Find a customer, and build a tool to empower them.”
Andy is one of the 1044 founders in the AppWorks network of founders across SE Asia.
Applications are open for Early Round applicants to our Accelerator until October 28. Come join us: http://bit.ly/2AVjkHz
-Doug Crets
English Communications Master, AppWorks
google map in english 在 google map變成英文介面??? - Mobile01 的推薦與評價
剛剛去看了play商店google map留言變成英文介面的有，但應該不多，幾個人說而已不然早就罵聲一片了所以應該是有什麼問題才會改變有其他朋友知道嗎? 我想變回中文啊. 0. ... <看更多>