<aside> đź’ˇ How Can This Help?
Trying to please everyone is a sure way to please no one. In your early days, it’s vital that you focus on just one customer segment, a set of customers with clear unique needs. This is what we call Segmentation.
“Why is this important???”, you might wonder.
Imagine walking into a pharmacy having a headache, you find three medicines Aspirin, Ibuprofen, or “Algipain” medicine that says: This pill relieves all possible pains. Would you even consider this last one? Exactly. It's not addressing your unique problem. If you were a photographer and had the choice between promoting yourself at a seminar with a thousand people or getting the list of twenty who are getting married this year, what would you choose? Knowing your customer is the core of every biz and niching the customer is the best way to do that.
Segmenting your market is crucial because success in doing business is all about understanding your customers and satisfy their needs better than the competition. But different customers have different needs and it's rarely possible to satisfy all customers by treating them equal.
Most segmentation practices out there are designed to be done after the product is already developed and exists, which leads to a further bigger problem. I’ve worked with several startups to notice this wrong trend about segmentation. Mostly all startups understand and agrees on the value of segmentation but does this major mistake. They segment too late.
The only issue, is that the usual” segmentation" practice is often done after acquiring a lot of customers, for customers that you already have. That’s when you’ll be able to see the pattern of attributes that make up your segments. However, when starting your biz, you don't have customers and that explains why customer segmentation is never a one-time activity.
They start with a one-size fits all approach to their product development and only use segmentation practices to determine their marketing and sales strategies. They fail to realize that the core of marketing and sales is to understand the customer and deliver to them designed and suited offerings that suit their needs. By delaying segmentation only to sell and market run the risk of creating products that no segment gets excited about.