If you agree that nothing is worse than building a product that no one wants to pay for, and you don’t really have a way to tell if your product concept is viable or not, this series of posts might shed a little light.
Tons have been written about how to create a minimally viable product, the importance of audience insights and the need to iterate, etc. We won’t be going there today. Instead, we’re going to quickly go over a couple of simple concepts that will get you started on assessing the marketability of your product idea.
Of Candy, Vitamins & Pain-Killers
Products generally meet a need, solve a problem or solve it more efficiently than existing solutions. I categorize products into three broad cateogories: Candy, Vitamins and Pain-Killers.
Pain-Killers = Pain-killer products solve mission-critical problems that cost users/businesses financial loss when they occur. They can be products that solve a problem in a very unique or efficient way or meet a pent-up need. Anyone who has ever experienced the blue screen of death (Mac users, please stop smirking), would be the target user for Carbonite, Mozy, iBackup and the more than two dozen or so online back-up services.
The best b2b pain-killer products are those that solve the problem with very little disruption to the existing infrastructure. The best b2c products in this category are those that require very little change in the user’s behavior.
Candy = Products in this category fulfill a need that transcends the functional. Many of the products in this category feed a user’s passion for an activity or hobby. Examples of candy products include Pinterest.com, video gaming accessories such as Turtle Beach headsets, the iPhone (not the best phone but great everything else) and Christian Louboutins (ladies, you know who you are).
Vitamins = Like vitamins, these products are ‘nice to haves’ and not ‘must haves.’ Vitamin products are either preventatives for problems that arise infrequently, those that improve the performance of a business process or those that solve problems that don’t obviously tie back to mission-critical processes.
Many of the current consumer applications of augmented reality haven’t gotten much traction beyond the early-adopter segment. QR codes have received much support from marketers and print production companies but have not enjoyed broad adoption by consumers.
Some products that began life as a vitamin product have evolved over time to a candy product. Foursquare and Twitter are two such products.
So based on the above, what category does your product concept belong to?
Photo by Pranjal Mahna on Flickr
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2 comments
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Giles Farrow
January 5, 2012 at 4:36 am (UTC -5) Link to this comment
I like the vitamin vs candy analogy.
It’s a useful guide on how to market / price your products.
e.g. sell candy as a quick impulse buy that delivers short-term satisfaction and then sell vitamins / must-haves that are better for their long-term health.
or sell them toothpaste
Jacqui C
January 5, 2012 at 11:31 pm (UTC -5) Link to this comment
Giles:
Thanks for stopping by. The interesting thing is investors like pain-killers best when making investment decisions and vitamins least. As I marketer I love working candy but pain-killers make better case studies. But then my experience has been that too many start-ups mistake their vitamin for a pain-killer.
Software Marketing Tweetables - 9 January 2012 | Smart Software Marketing
January 9, 2012 at 10:17 am (UTC -5) Link to this comment
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