Tuesday, September 9, 2008

I am not my own customer

Here's a problem that I have entailed often and maybe some of you can sympathize with me.

I'll be sitting around one day and think of what I believe to be a good business idea. Lets just pretend its B2C. I will then spend the next few hours or days trying to poke holes in it and massage it into something that I would be a customer of.

Therein lies the problem. I am a really bad customer. I ignore as many advertisements as I can (unless they are humorous!). I tend to do extensive research before making a purchase I am interested in or consult close friends who have expertise in the area, say cars or certain tech products. I have rarely, if ever, clicked on one of those Google advertisement links and will generally comb the internet to find exactly what I am looking for. I have used eBay all of two maybe three times in my life. I am, however, a loyal customer. Believe me, once I have used your services and you were exceptional in the service that you provided, you better believe that I will do what I can in my power to make sure people around me all know about you/your company.

So I tend to end up in one of two holes, either the idea or business is great and I may not use it myself or I will change it up so much to what I think will work and no one else will use it! I guess the question of the day is how in love with your product or idea do you have to be to go after it? Full blown blinding passion? Or more logical execution with a great understanding of the market?

2 comments:

Josh Rosenfield said...

Perhaps then you are the best judge of ideas. You said yourself that if a product or service is good, you would then be loyal to it.

So your problem with yourself is that you don't fall for gimmicky products or ideas that may be able to sell but on a product that really isn't that great. Sometimes you just have to think about the average consumer, and whether you could sell something to them.

I think there's two different objectives here: one is to make money, the other is to make something you would buy yourself.

A lot of the time you can't have both. You think the guy who makes all the inflatable guitars for bar mitzvahs has them hanging all over his walls at home?

I heard Bill Gates uses a Mac.

Vladik said...

You make a very good point Josh. Bill uses a Mac? Trader!...