If Your Product Still Won’t Sell, Here’s What You’re Missing
You worked hard to create a quality product. You promoted it using every means at your disposal: submitting to hundreds of download sites, soliciting reviews, issuing a press release, improving your web site, creating a compelling shareware version, and utilizing a variety of registration incentives. You thought you covered all the bases, yet somehow, your product just isn’t selling, and you don’t know why. Perhaps you’ve even had the unpleasant experience of seeing your sales decline as you worked harder and harder on promotion. Maybe you’ve even been through this process with more than one product and experienced the same dismal results.So what can you do to prevent falling into this same trap with your next product? Here are seven simple steps I recommend to increase the odds that your next product will sell incredibly well:
- Find hungry customers.
- Decide how you’ll reach those hungry customers.
- Find out who else is feeding those hungry customers.
- Decide how you’ll convince those hungry customers that you have the best food.
- Determine how you can create the best food for these hungry customers.
- Determine whether you can afford to feed these hungry customers.
- Identify the secret ingredient no one else can copy.
Eric Sohn on December 12th, 2005 6:39 pm
Good list, but…
The best food isn’t necessarily the “best”. It is matching what the hungry customer wants to eat at an acceptable price point.
Consider the 37signals apps. Are those the best of their ilk? Absolutely not – but they meet needs and the price point of the customers.
Hamburger and filet mignon are both beef, but there’s a market for both – as well as places in between. But, marketing burgers to people who want the filet aint gonna work (unless the burger is made from filet, but priced more like a burger).
Similarly, “best” doesn’t necessarily flow from what you’d expect. On a feature or economic basis, the iPod wasn’t “best” when it came out. But, it was the best because of other, unconsidered (and unmet) needs.
With those caveats…
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