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Why did I fail with the online code-generation services – Advise(III): Test your market exists
(cross-posted from the “Stories of a (failed) entrepreneur” blog)
This is the third in a series of posts trying to explain what I think went wrong with my attempt of selling online code-generation services, that I end up shutting down due to the lack of clients. In previous posts, I recommended to Choose a cool technology to sell but do not try to sell to developers.
My third advice is to make sure you test your target market really exists. And let me emphasize the word “test”. Obviously, I believed it existed. And I even commented it with “family and friends” and they all confirmed my idea was great!. But I didn’t go beyond that. I thought my gut feeling and those encouraging comments of some close colleagues was enough to justify my “huge” time investment in the complete creation and deployment of the services. No test, no prototyping, nor pretotyping either.
My services were directed to individual developers interested in accelerating their development process by using models to bootstrap the web applications they were contracted to do. As it is now obvious, such group of developers do not really exist. From all my conversations with MDE vendors, I’ve now realized that most successful MDE companies are targeting business people instead of pure developers and big companies instead of freelance developers or small companies.
And when the market does not exist it’s not a matter of adding more features, lowering the price or spending more on marketing (good marketing helps but doesn’t do miracles). The sooner you realize your market does not exist the better. Just get over it and move to your next idea.
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Yes. But how do you test/prototype market existence if you don’t provide something to test? Particularly in IT field…
I like the concept of pretotyping for instance. However, I agree you may need to build a little to test the market but it’s important that you realize that if people are not responding it’s maybe because there is no market for that (instead of assuming that it´s because you´re missing a critical feature that will bring a lot of users, and enter into an infinite loop with this)
To “pretotype” you need to first market your idea… but how do you know you’re doing your marketing right? Marketing for geeks is even harder than identifying a market.
I think your perception of “pretotyping” being a good idea comes from the fact that you didn’t try it. You would soon find out that testing a market is equally hard than building a product. You would probably quit your idea thinking there was no market, when after all what was wrong was your “pretotyping”…
Tricky situations…
[...] 25) but after my quest for world domination with my online code-generation services failed (see the whys), some of them are no longer useful to me in the short term and I’m open to sell them if [...]