One of the most important early decisions that a startup can make is who they are setting out to serve. A startup generally is built upon a key hypothesis that someone needs something. Clearly identifying that “someone” sets the stage for testing that hypothesis and eventually being very focused in marketing to the right audience.
Since a key focus for SDG Games is that our games be educational, perhaps our initial target market should be Christian Homeschooling Families. By my estimate, there’s somewhere in the range of 200,000 to 1 million Christian homeschooling households. That’s a big enough market to go after, but a focused enough market to deeply understand and target.
Identifying the target market is good, but to deeply understand the needs of this market, we need to take our thinking down to the level of the individual decision maker and how she will value what we have to offer. We start by creating a persona for our target buyer and then identify the jobs, gains, and pains that drive her decision making. We put it all together in a Customer Profile.
Of course, all of these are hypotheses which will be tested. More about that in my next article in this series.