There is some business advice that cannot be said enough. Because try as we might, we often forget the lessons we learn. I know I do anyway. Reading about the concept of a “perfect market fit” in Ryan Holiday’s book Growth Hacker Marketing inspired me to write this article. Holiday argues that businesses succeed when the market wants the product they offer. Let the market tell you what it wants, he says.
I couldn’t agree more. Holiday provides dozens of examples of businesses that have put this principle into practice and made it a priority over the past few years. It’s a great read–one a mentee recommended to me actually.
Years ago, I learned firsthand the importance of creating for the market. A good friend who worked in the music industry approached me with an idea: Could I reinvent the guitar pick? With one major exception, guitar picks had remained essentially unchanged for decades. The exception was a producer who had created a wildly popular guitar pick that had an alien’s skull printed on it. The fact that his pick was selling so well told me that there was a market for novelty guitar picks. So I began creating my own designs. I assumed that guitarists would want to buy picks with images of bikini-clad women and promptly named my startup “Hot Picks.”
I was wrong. The picks bombed. No one bought them.
This second time around, I decided to visit Hot Topic to see what the kids were buying. Skulls were everywhere. So I created new designs in the shape of skulls, as well as others. We created a catalogue of all of our designs and asked several local music stores to carry it. Which designs did customers like the best?
I was asking the market to tell me what it wanted. And sure enough, the skull picks were very popular.
Knowing your customer is so critical. In the years that have passed since Hot Picks, I’ve forgotten to implement what I learned. I’ve been assuming I know what my students want, but I’ve never actually asked them. So I’m starting the New Year by changing things up. I’m going to approach them point blank.
Now that I’ve rediscovered this important truth via Growth Hacker Marketing, I see smart businessman putting it into practice all around me. Just the other day, Tim Ferriss asked his Facebook followers what they want to see in another edition of The 4-Hour Workweek. Genius.
You can never take all of the guesswork out of creating a successful product, but you can take a lot of it out. Don’t design in a vacuum. Don’t stop asking. The needs and wants of your customers are changing all the time.
In the end, Hot Picks was a great success. We were awarded “Best in Show” at NAMM. We created dozens of other picks with different designs. We became a Disney licensee. We even made a pick for Taylor Swift! The truth is that we ended up selling millions of picks because we kept asking our customers what they wanted.
Originally published on Inc.com December 30th 2014.
