If Your Product Is Not Gaining Traction, It May Be Solving Only a Nice-to-Have Need

Some companies work hard for a while and finally launch their product or service. After six months, a year, or even longer without a positive market response, the team may go back to review the design and look for improvements. It may even conclude that marketing is the problem and that it needs a larger promotional budget, and so on. In fact, the likeliest problem is that the issue you address is not a must-have but a nice-to-have. A nice-to-have is essentially optional: it meets a weak need and does not readily persuade customers to pay. If it is a must-have, customers have no other choice and still have to buy from you, however expensive it is. It would actually be unusual for a startup idea to address no need whatsoever. There is normally some starting point, perhaps a need experienced by someone on the founding team. But the proposed solution may not genuinely persuade customers to pay. You still need to go through a complete process of customer-need discovery. Do not rush to commit too much capital before you truly understand those needs. Next, if your business is based on a technical breakthrough but offers only a 10% or 20% improvement—better performance or lower costs—it can also be regarded as meeting a weak need. Customers may not switch suppliers, since they may already have long-standing, stable relationships with existing partners. Those partners probably have an advantage over a newcomer in trust, distribution, commercial terms, and brand. A 10–20% improvement demonstrated only by laboratory data is therefore unlikely to create a meaningful commercial breakthrough. The improvement has to be a multiple, ideally a clearly demonstrable benefit of more than tenfold backed by real commercial data. Then it becomes a must-have. ----- Some startup teams, inspired by who knows what, incorporate social contributions into their business model before the business has even begun: donating a fixed proportion to disadvantaged groups, helping a particular industry such as small farmers, or giving back to society in other ways. Personally, I have no major objection to making money and giving back. But do not mistake effects for causes. Before you have figured out your service, product, and business model, do not make giving back to society your primary selling point. You first need to build your product, service, and business model and understand the unmet needs customers face. Why do they buy—why do they pay you? Establish the order of their needs: which problem must be solved first? That is their must-have. If you can meet a need they cannot otherwise satisfy, the business becomes easier to grow. A customer’s decision-making priorities might run from 1 through 10. As they compare suppliers in that order, charitable giving may be near the bottom. When there is little else left to distinguish the vendors, doing a little more for society may win you the order. But if your business already meets the customer’s leading priorities, it may not matter whether you make social contributions.