How I start with the right questions

Searching for your answers from the right angle

Today, I’m going to talk about asking the right questions when you are looking to start your business, add a new product/service, or pivot your business in some way.

Giving your idea a compass before you put effort into developing your new product or service will save you time and money and a whole lot of hit/miss frustration.

Unfortunately, most people don’t want to spend time looking into their chosen direction for fear of learning that there’s no market for it or, because they simply don’t think the research will be worth the time.

But, this is a case where “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” (Ben Franklin).

Making your next move – whether that’s developing a new product or pivoting your business - shouldn’t be a guessing game.

Photo by D koi on Unsplash

I’ve been doing market research for clients for well over a decade. I’ve worked with solopreneur clients, clients at small companies, and clients at large companies. Entrepreneurs want to know about their product’s viability, established companies want to keep adding products, and some others realize they need to pivot in some way to keep the doors open. To get to the right questions for each of these scenarios, we need to:

• Get a realistic sense of where things stand today in your business.

• Have at least a vague sense of where you want to go. (Yes, I said vague.)

It seems like a simple 2 things to do so that you can ask the right questions and get to developing that new product or making that pivot.

But, it’s not where people think about starting.

Many times when I start working with a new client, they want to start with questions about TAM and SAM (Total Addressable Market and Serviceable Addressable Market) and the like. At this stage, though, we’re not even close to answering those questions…they are the wrong questions.

Step 1: Get a realistic sense of where things stand today.

To get some place new, to solve a problem, you have to have a sense of where things stand today.

Think about it like you do your GPS. The first thing your GPS picks up on is your current location. It can’t even begin to tell you how to get to your destination without it. Same thing applies here.

At the start of every project with a client, we walk through these questions:

• What products and services do you offer today?

• Who are your customers?

• Who are your competitors?

When you are brand new, you may not have customers or competitors, but you likely have an idea of your definition of them. That’s where to start.

All this will add up and give you a broader picture of what’s going on in your niche and will start to give you some comparisons based on what else is in the market.

Step 2: Have at least a vague sense of where you want to go.

If you knew your exact destination and exactly how to get there, you wouldn’t need market research. Full stop.

But, as it turns out, the world’s a big place and the only constant is change, so no one can really be expected to know exactly where they’re going at all times.

Even so, most clients have at least a vague sense of what they have set out to do, which leads us to our second set of questions:

• Where do you want to go?

• Why?

The ‘Why’ here is about why you believe you need to go where it is you said you wanted to go. Is it that you need a new product in order to address a new problem your customers have? Is it to address a competitor’s new moves? “Why” here is about the problem you are solving with the “where do you want to go”.

Again, these may be vague for you at this point. With my clients, I’m not expecting them to have all the details. The details will be determined by the research we’re about to do. We’re simply defining a starting point.

But, we’re making sure we’ve asked the right questions about why we need research in the first place. It sets the compass in the right direction.

In these questions, there’s no TAM or SAM. We can’t start there. It just doesn’t make sense to. These questions in Steps 1 and 2 are the right questions at this stage.

Remember when I said ‘the world is a big place’?

That’s really where people get stuck when they try to start answering these questions. There’s so much information out there!

That’s why I created the 4-Step Find Your Wedge framework. It’s an outline, it’s a starting point, it’s direction. Yessss! Give it a go, let me know what you think!

Stay tuned-

Julie