Whether you’re a small business owner, CEO, or manager, your mind is constantly spinning with new ideas to increase efficiency in your organization, better serve your customers, or maybe even help improve employee performance.
While these are important factors and great benefits of unique business ideas, what it all really boils down to is a desire to:
- Increase Revenue
- Protect Revenue
- Reduce Costs
- Avoid Costs
This is easier said than done though, right? If you missed Part 1 of our Idea to Revenue series, you can catch up and learn about the first critical element in taking your idea from just a concept to a solution and ultimately new revenue with custom software. The second critical element is no less important than the first.
Understanding Users is the Second Critical Element in Creating New Revenue from a Unique Business Idea with Custom Software
When you’re getting to know someone new for the first time, what do you do to learn about them? You ask questions, right? The same is true when trying to understand the users of your potential custom software solution. We have found asking these questions to be very helpful:
- How many different kinds of users do we have?
- How many of each type of could we potentially encounter?
- What are their problems, wants, and needs?
- How are they coping today?
- How will we improve their lives with our new product, service, or idea?
Start by asking the right questions to fully understand your users and never assume you know what kind of user you have, what they want or need out of your product or service, or how they might want to utilize your custom software solution.
From here, you can model potential users into personas. This is a profile you can create of the different types of customers you may encounter. While they will be somewhat generalized, it’s important to have 3-4 unique personas you want to target with your idea. Some details you may include would be things like:
- Their role in a given company. Ex: CEO, Marketing Manager, Human Resources Manager, etc.
- The goals and objectives this type of person may be looking to accomplish in their organization.
- The types of barriers and constraints they may currently be facing and even how your offering could benefit them.
2 Quick Tips on Understanding Your Users
Start small and simple: Chat with past or current customers, strike up a conversation with people you meet in your everyday life, and take advantage of inexpensive resources like “Talking to Humans” by Giff Constable. You don’t have to spend a lot to get things started in the right direction.
Always continue learning: A common mistake is to spend a lot of effort early on in customer development, assuming you have it all figured out. Understanding your users is something you have to do continuously. Your users and customers live in a changing world. Their perceptions change. Their options change. You need to engage in continuous discovery with your customers and users. So, don’t ever stop trying to understand them.
Are you curious about what personas actually look like and how to develop them in more detail? Great news! We’ll be going over all of this and more in our upcoming, free webinar. Click here to register! Want to know more about taking your unique business idea and creating it into a custom software solution? Schedule a free consultation with us!
