Why Needs Assessment is Not Necessary For Your Niche Product
Don’t waste your time to ‘prepare’ for your side hustle.
Hi, it’s Takuya here, the solo developer of Inkdrop — a Markdown note-taking app for programmers. I’m building it alone from idea to operations and now its monthly revenue has reached 3,747 USD. I wrote a story about how I built it until the first sales and I’ve mentioned about what service to make in your personal development in the article: finding an itch you feel everyday. I would like to talk about it a little bit more.
It’s not easy to find an idea which a lot of users will want. It’s almost impossible to know beforehand. But I’ve seen not a few people trying to know that by asking people “Do you think you want it?” They seem to fear failure. They don’t want to waste their time and efforts. However, if you found your itch to solve, you should try it. Just go ahead. No need to know whether people want it or not. Here is why.
People Don’t Know What They Exactly Want
Don’t trust their answers.
I talked my idea of Inkdrop to my friends when I was building it. But they told me they don’t need it. Moreover, they even don’t understand my itch. So, am I wrong? No. There were already a lot of Markdown editors and note-taking apps. I was not satisfied with them but the reasons are hard to understand for other people — UI design, built-in sync across platforms, simplicity, performance, etc. You can’t understand my itch perfectly if you are not in the same boat.
It is good that my friends don’t understand my idea. If they could, there should have been already products solving my problem. I’ve been looking for them for a few years but couldn’t. That doesn’t mean that there is no one in the same boat with me because I’m an ordinary man, not special. That’s because they were just not aware of their itch yet, or it was technically hard to solve.
If you’re having this problem, it’s likely hundreds of thousands of others are in the same boat. — DHH
It’s hard to imagine services that don’t exist yet. People will usually react to your talk like “Ew, are you serious?” Because it’s not a product like a washing machine or refrigerator. Niche products basically look odd for almost people. But once I have rolled Inkdrop out, some people said “That’s exactly what I was looking for!” — They finally understood my itch.
No One Can Know What Will Become A Hit
Keep working on it and ignore what they say if it would solve your everyday itch. Yes, as they say, it may not get many users, but also it may get many users. No one can know what happens until it is released.
For example, blogging is one of creations you could find that it’s hard to know if an article will make a buzz or not before you publish. No matter how carefully and thoroughly you wrote it based on successful theories of writing, the likelihood of getting a buzz is still unknown. One of my articles has got covered at the first place on Hacker News but I have never imagined it to be happened.
Writing a blog is a gift. You can’t expect people will always find it helpful and will share it. All you can do is to keep writing. That’s why successful people say you have to build a MVP fast, roll it out and see what happens.
Start by making something clean and simple that you would want to use yourself. Get a version 1.0 out fast, then continue to improve the software, listening closely to users as you do.
— Paul Graham, from “Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age”
Keep Running Until People Find Out Your App
Again, there must be people in the same boat. You don’t have to worry about it. But niche products need some time to be found out. Inkdrop took one year until it started getting tractions since the first official release, as you can see in the revenue report of Stripe:
It’s not a bad news if nothing happened when you released it. That’s because your app is not discovered by anyone yet. Don’t judge it in a hurry. There are three things you should do until it gets discovered.
Improve your app for yourself
Why you make it is because you want it. You know what your product should be like. Keep up your work to be so. It becomes more clear what you would solve as you continue to develop it. And you should be a heavy user of your product. Use it everyday. If you don’t feel like doing it, it means that your product doesn’t solve the problem, or it might not be a big problem to solve.
Provide good, quick and warm user support
Users are your mates who share the same problem. They likely know other similar guys. You have to attract them to become your fans who will spread your product through word-of-mouth. It can be done by doing what big companies can’t as I wrote before:
Talk about your stories that would be helpful for someone
Inkdrop’s almost users came from my blog. You should have a lot of things to talk about your experience related to your product. Why I made Inkdrop is because I am obsessed with my productivity and creativity. So I have a lot of things to talk about them on my blog. And those articles make chances for my product to be known. There are not only blog but also a lot of media to publish your stories on the internet, like YouTube and Podcast. You can choose it as you like.
Do It Just For Fun
You may have following reasons that make you be afraid of failure:
You are doing it for proving how great you are
If your purpose of making something is to get recognized from many people, that will cause fear. Because if you failed, it reveals that you are worthless. You are afraid of yourself. You are relying your happiness on other people — and they will notice your mind through your product, claiming applauses like “I’m great! Say my work is great!” If you found something like that in your mind, rethink about your motivation.
You don’t love what you do
If you make something you love, it should not matter whether people like it or not because you are already happy by doing that. Making a good product is hard, of course. But you know, making a good product for what you don’t love is much harder than that. It’s a side hustle. Why don’t you enjoy it?
You think you will get nothing if you fail
A failure would give you many things to learn. It’s not a waste of time if you learn from failures. You can do it better next time. Try it again and again. Then, the prospect of your success will increase. Like smart people have made a lot of mistakes in the past.
You are already happy because you have something you want to do. Don’t waste your time to ‘prepare’ for your product. Just build it now!
