How many customers can you get?
The answer to big question of “How many customers?” starts by figuring out the answer to several subsidiary questions.
The first question is how many people match your target persona in the places you plan to offer your product or service. Be realistic in assuming that initially you will only be offering your product or service in very few places and perhaps only in a small geography. How many people or businesses or institutions do you estimate match the description of your persona.
Where and how will your target persona find you?
You might have a great product or service but unless potential customers can find out about you then they will never be your customer. Where do you expect your target persona will find your product or service for the first time?
Do you plan to rent a store in a mall with lots of foot traffic? will it be through online ads that bring your target personas to your website? or will you rent a booth at a convention where your customers congregate? will it be at a special event with a special invite list? or will you pay celebrities to mention you to send people to your Instagram? or will you pass out flyers at the beach? Where do you plan to find your first personas to interest them in your product?
How many of your target persona to you expect to intersect with at this target location? How have you estimated this number. Guessing won’t work. You need to make your estimate based upon some very relevant experience, like from somebody who works in the industry, or by hanging out in the mall where you’ll offer your product and count people who enter a similar store.
Whatever your ideas are, it is straightforward to test them out by hanging out where and when you think your persona will be when they will need your product or service and physically count them. If you are not sure somebody fits your persona, then ask them, after all with sprints 3 and 4 under your belt you now know how to engage a stranger in a conversation.
If you are not sure the person fits your persona, do not count them. Note how the number of potential customers change with time (and maybe season). If your business will be online then it does not cost much to run an actual online ad and see how many people click on it.
For businesses, there are directories that are available at the library that list all or most of the enterprises in various markets, so you should be able to get a decent count of how many of these businesses match your targeted segment.
How will you entice them to try your product or service?
Next question: If you know where and when you will find lots of potential customers that match the profile of your target persona, then you need to figure out how you will pique their curiosity in your product or service to even stop and notice it. Will it be distinctive packaging on a shelf in a store? or you looking dapper and charismatic giving a very quick pitch to people you hand flyers to? or the fact that the ad you place has a compelling design that gets people to click on the freemium offer? How many of the personas that pass by or look at your ad will actually stop and look or click through?
But stopping and noticing or clicking on an ad and landing on your site is not nearly enough. You now must figure out how you would entice the potential customer to spend enough time with your product or service to fall in love with it. Free samples and freemiums are classic ways to get potential customers to fully experience a product or service.
There are also virtual ways such as by watching others play and enjoy a product, which gives a sense of the excitement and joy of its use. Testimonials of actual users sometimes can work if the person giving the testimonial is relatable and is convincing. Making the product or service super simple and intuitive to use will entice a few curious potential customer to try it.
If you can make a potential customer feel as if they discovered your product or service by making the act of getting there fun and mysterious, but not hard or long in duration, then that can entice them to try it. You could get them to think, “look what I found, let’s see if it works;” but you need to be really good to pull off what’s called a reveal strategy.
You can try out your enticement ideas as experiments. You can even offer or give away competitor’s products that are not as good as yours and see how many of the potential customers actually accept the inferior offer. Act out small portions of the service you plan to offer and see how long and seriously that engages potential customers. With some simple experiments you can get a sense of how many of the potential customers you can get in front of you can instill enough curiosity to try out the product or service you plan to offer.
How do you plan to make them very happy with their first encounter(s) with you?
Here is the next step because capturing the attention of a potential customer still is not enough. The first experience with a product or service needs to create enough positive emotions, i.e., happiness, to be forever remembered in some form. You want this first encounter to be recalled anytime the product or service is used or enjoyed.
Personalized attention and beautiful presentations are examples (think of boxes containing Apple products being hand delivered to you at Apple Stores). Using the name of the customer during use shows a desire to care for that individual. Featuring something surprising about your product or service when it is first used is often super-successful.
It doesn’t need to be big, just pleasantly surprising. Little details make a big difference.
Estimating the number of customers
With the insight you gained from thinking through these four questions, you have enough information to make an estimate.
Start with the estimate of the number of people that fit you target persona.
You know how many of them you can intercept at specific times and places.
You can estimate how many of the personas that you intercept you can get to spend enough time with your product or service to understand it.
You have a sense of things you can do to get some decent percentage of the people that get to know your product or service to fall in love with it. How many is that? This is an important number to know.
To get a more accurate estimate you will need to go through these steps with an actual prototype once you start investing money and resources in experimenting how to make your idea a reality. As you move forward, it will be important to design your prototype so that it incorporates or enables as many of these enticement strategies as you have developed.
Crucial next steps
You are now at a point in your journey where you should feel optimistic that you understand strategies you can use to entice plenty of initial customers. If you do not feel confident, then you need to keep thinking and bring in some creative people you know to help you improve your idea to make it more attractive to a larger percentage of your target persona. Or, you might need to target a different persona with an even more enticing product.
If and when you do have confidence in being able to entice a large percentage of your target persona, there is one final step to complete to have all the information you need to validate your idea as realistic and to get others excited to help you. You need to figure out how much these potential customers will be willing to pay you, which is what we challenge you with doing in sprint 6.