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MenuWhen we make a product platform, face different target users how to do?
Different users have different demands
The platform function can not meet the needs of different users
how to do?
Answers
The best way to approach this problem is by identifying primary pain points that users share and focus on those feature-wise, a common denominator of some sorts. These pain points need to be very high/strong though to be valuable for multiple target audiences.
If you're facing two target markets (you're a connecting middleman of some sorts) then you might consider building two separate entry points with two functionality sets. That is only justifiable when one target market offer cannot exist without the other.
In a typical situation you still want to identify the target users that contribute to the biggest market with largest growth potential and tailor your offering to those.
Once you identify the segment try to understand who early adaptors are and make your product for their biggest pain points first, then expand once you have traction.
As a conclusion I would suggest that sometimes you have to choose who you leave behind in your offering at least until you have traction and growth with your primary target audience.
Please feel free to reach out if you want more advice, as I deal with that on the daily basis with my current job.
Cheers,
Denis.
This is a good problem to have. We're in the same position with our product Widgetic.
My advice would be to go through this article by Paul Graham:
http://paulgraham.com/ds.html.
I did a resume of what you need, here:
**Fire** - Focus on a deliberately narrow market (subsets of users). It's like keeping a fire contained at first to get it really hot before adding more logs.
**Consult** - pick a single user and act as if they were consultants building something just for that one user. The initial user serves as the form for your mold; keep tweaking till you fit their needs perfectly.
As you can see, this also seems the best approach - which not many products are lucky to have - to pick a specific target user group and focus on that initially, to get as much of that market first.
Great question! You can build a new platform that initially satisfy every type of users, you will most likely end up building a platform that nobody ends up finding useful, build a Frankenstein of platform that is extremely hard to use and understand or it will take you forever to build the platform.
What I would do is analyse the different types of users that could be interested in you platform and build it for 1 group. Once you achieve adoption with that group, you can build the features to target another group and repeat until you can cover the entire target market.
If you can provide a bit more detail on your platform, we can go into details specifically for you. The Lean Product playbook from Dan Olsen can also be a good starting point if you want to read more about this
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