What to do if your product isn’t taking offSeven steps you can take today to try to turn things around
👋 Hey, I’m Lenny and welcome to a 🔒 subscriber-only edition 🔒 of my weekly newsletter. Each week I tackle reader questions about building product, driving growth, and accelerating your career. P.S. New swag drop
First of all, I’m sorry. Spending years of your life on an idea that isn’t clicking—the long hours, the stress, your reputation on the line, and not seeing the fruit of all that labor—it sucks. Especially while everyone around you is seemingly killing it. Most startups, and new product ideas, fail—we all know this—but it’s different when it’s your product. If it’s any consolation, this is going to be happening to a lot of startups in the coming months:
To help you make it through the darkness, here’s a series of concrete actions you can take today to try to turn things around:
Remember, many product builders have gone through what you’re going through now and have found a way. You can too. 1. Talk to more users (actually do it)This tweet from Tomer London (CPO of Gusto) sums it up:
Gustaf Alströmer, a Group Partner at Y Combinator, shared this same advice during our chat after I asked him why most startups fail: 
Also:
I know you’ve heard this advice before, and you’re probably doing it, but if you’re not, make it a point to talk to 5 to 10 potential customers this week. If you already are, that’s great. When talking to people, look for two things: pain and pull. Pain tells you there’s an opportunity to solve a problem. Pull tells you that you’re actually solving the problem. Here’s what pain and pull look like in practice:
When I was building my startup Localmind, we were talking to users all the time, and people constantly told us they loved the product, but, looking back, we didn’t hear much about their pain point. The pain we were solving turned out to be very low (helping people decide where to go out). It was a magical experience when it worked, and some people continued to use it, but for most people, it was more of a novelty than solving a real problem. We should have been more focused on the problem, and the pain we were solving, than the novelty of the solution. If you boil it down, to build a successful business, you need to solve a big enough problem for a big enough group of people to make a profit. Everything in this post is a way to help you find a bigger problem or a bigger group of people. Homework:
2. Change your target audience/ICPYou may have the perfect solution to a different person’s problem. Instead of trying to bang your head against the wall to convince the same people they need your product, try pitching someone else entirely. The founders of Pinterest started off by pitching tech people, but almost by accident realized the group that needed Pinterest was 30-something female bloggers. The founders of Retool thought their product was for ops teams, but it turned out it was CTOs. DoorDash started with only independently owned restaurants in tier-2 and tier-3 cities. Stytch first went after growth teams, but then realized engineers wanted it most. Netflix realized their initial target audience should be DVD fanatics in online communities, because that’s who most wanted endless DVDs. Instagram initially went after designers interested in photography who had large Twitter followings. Snapchat initially went after high school students in Orange County. Your target audience should also be very narrow. Almost comically narrow. Shoot for at least three narrowing characteristics. For inspiration, here are the original ideal customer profiles (ICPs) for top B2B products and, below that, the original target audience for top B2C products (what I call the “super-specific who”).
Why should your target market be so narrow? Several reasons:
“The goal is for a fledgling start-up to take customers away from an established incumbent by focusing all their power at a single point of attack. This will be a problem that conventional solutions are not addressing well, one that is increasing in severity and attracting the attention of top management. The start-up commits to solving this problem 100%.” —Geoffrey Moore, author of Crossing the Chasm
“It’s a lot easier to boil a thimble than the ocean.” —Sarah Tavel, GP at Benchmark Homework: 3. Change your positioning/messaging/pitchYou may have the perfect solution for the perfect person, but if they don’t understand how your product will help them, they won’t pay attention. In her amazing guest post, April Dunford relays how simply changing her team’s product positioning from a “Microsoft Access killer” to an “embeddable database for mobile devices” changed the trajectory of their business. In my post on crafting your pitch, I share stories of how DoorDash, Netflix, and Behance took off only once they figured out how to pitch their product effectively (and without changing the product itself). In the case of Ramp, all they had initially was the messaging:
Here are examples of how some of the most popular B2C apps successfully pitched their products early on:
Homework: 4. Try a “kickstarter” to get the word outMaybe you do indeed have the right solution, for the right people, with the right pitch, but these people just haven’t heard about you yet. ... Subscribe to Lenny's Newsletter to read the rest.Become a paying subscriber of Lenny's Newsletter to get access to this post and other subscriber-only content. A subscription gets you:
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