Why Getting to Know Your Beachhead Market is Essential?
Many founders skip this bit..
Knowing the basics of entrepreneurship is crucial in order to have a reasonable path which you can explain to, not just investors, but yourself that you know what you are doing. It is unlike saying ‘I have an idea and I just jumped into developing a product’.
And, one of these basics is to think deeply about who would use your product, in other words, who would want his or her problem to be solved more than anyone. Startups cannot risk of targeting more than one market segment in the beginning. They are vulnerable and weak in early stages. So, we have to guess which specific market segment would be the most keen to solve the problem we’ve detected. Hence, we might avoid the risks that could be involved in spreading our concentration and marketing expenses to different segments, leading us to not fully understand any of the segments at all.
Shortly, we need to find the beachhead market (entry segment) to give a smooth kick off to get off the ground.
Note that this isn’t about closing entire possible market segments. This is just about giving our focus into one particular segment in the beginning. By this way, we can deeply understand this particular segment and have great insights to fit our product. This is how we can reach the product-market fit easily. We can also concentrate our marketing and sales channels into this group of people.
When I come up with an idea, I often try to think about how can I own this small segment. However, I also started to think about whether this segment would be large enough to sustain my business. Of course, there could be other segments, thus more customers can arrive to buy at some point but it seems to be challenging to to get out of the runways if we don’t know what we are doing and whom are we doing for.
Nowadays, there are still founders who don’t think about the very first prospective customers before developing a product. This is quite common in technology-push ideas where the founders develop a generic tech-solution. They don’t give a second thought on who would use it and what for?!
If you don’t understand your customer, how are you going to sell them anything? At the end of the day, aren’t you trying to solve a problem of a particular group of people? How are you going to detect that problem if you don’t know who has that problem in the first place?
