How to avoid creating products that no one wants

This is part 1 of a series on how to discover if your next-great-software-idea is worth pursuing.

What drives people to buy something?

Knowing the right answer to this question can mean the difference between creating a multi-million dollar business and something that no one uses.

My goal with this series of posts to really get into the minds of your users* and discover what they really want from your product and why they use it.

I want you to reduce the chances of creating something that people don't use or consider useful.

But before we dive in on what to do, we need to explore what to avoid. Believe it or not, you probably have a bunch of beliefs that are stopping you from making something people want. We'll analyze a lot of them today.

When someone says that a product has a product-market fit, they usually mean that the product addresses an important user's "need. But what is a "need"?

What is a need?

Here’s one thing I think we can all agree on: Your product and its features exist to address some need(s) people have. But what is a “need”?

Ask 5 people and you’ll get 5 different definitions.

So before we continue, let's define a "need" in a way that makes sense. I found the 'jobs to be done' approach to offer a good definition of a need:

A need is a job that a customer is trying to get done. Your product is just one of the many options that he or she can “hire” to get the job done.

Just so you get the idea, here are some examples of a job-to-be-done (or JTBD in short):

• “find a home for sale”
• “slow the skin from aging”
• “manage financial security”
• “remove a stain from clothing”.

For any of those jobs, you can “hire” various products to get them done.

Do you notice something common among all 4 jobs-to-be-done mentioned above? They're "timeless".

What people want doesn't usually change over time

Let me explain.

Imagine we’re back in 2005, or even 1995. Would people still have a need for the things that I outlined above (finding a home for sale, etc?) They sure would.

Jobs-to-be-done are relatively “stable” over time. People will always want to find a suitable partner for a relationship, verify if a potential hire is a criminal or get a child to be more disciplined.

What changes, however, are the products that help people get those jobs done. To find a suitable partner, first there were newspaper ads. Then dating agencies. Then came online dating sites and apps.

People switched from newspaper ads to dating apps because it helped them accomplish the job of finding a suitable partner in a better/cheaper way compared to other existing solutions.

Or take the job of “listening to music while on the go”. First there were WalkMans, then modern MP3 players, then the iPod and now simply smartphones.

The job of "listening to music on the go" didn't change. The products that helped people get that job better did.

How is this relevant to software?

This concept applies to software as well

Your software doesn’t exist to help people get something done.

People can already do what they want to do without software. It's just...slower (or less efficient, or less predictable) to do it.

Given enough time and money, you can do anything without software (think of doing your taxes using tax management software vs. a pen/paper).

Most software products exist to help people get something done better / cheaper / more efficient than the next best alternative. This is why people "hire" i.e. use your software product , rather than doing things manually.

Remember our previous point about jobs-to-be-done being timeless? This applies to software as well. The job-to-be-done for which your software was hired has probably always existed. Here are a few examples of popular software and one of their main jobs-to-be-done:

• Basecamp => manage company projects
• Generative AI tools like DALL-E => get a suitable logo for your software
• Indie Hackers => learn how to grow my bootstrapped business

Before Basecamp, things were done on pen on paper. Before DALL-E, many logos were done (and are still done) by a professional graphics designer. Before Indie Hackers, people needed to go and find a good user on Twitter to learn from.

Do you know what people 'hire' your SaaS for?

The consequences of not knowing this can be brutal. The railroad industry proves this point.

When trucks became a thing, railroad companies didn't realize that the reason people hire railroads was to "get from point A to point B in the fastest time possible".

As a consequence, railroad companies focused on making trains more comfortable instead of making them...faster.

In other words, railroad companies wrongly “railroads” business and not the “transportation” business ( you can read “Marketing Myopia” by Theodore Levitt if you want to learn more.)

Many software products make the same mistake and don't realize the real reason (i.e. job-to-be-done) people hire their product for.

But do people themselves know that reason? In other words, do people really know what they want in the first place?

Do people really know what they want?

Okay, so you've decided to learn that people 'hire' your product for.

The first question that probably goes on your mind is to ask them: "what do you want from X", where X is your product or product categories.

You go and ask 10 people. and get 100 confusing answers.

This causes you to (wrongly) assume that we, as people, generally don't know what we want.

Well, it turns out that people do know what they want as long as you ask good questions.

When you ask someone a vague question like “What do you need from a project management software”, it’s true that in general you'll get useless answers. But why?

Because you're asking people to do several things at the same time:

a) Realize why they use a project management software in the first place
b) Try to invent solutions for you (tell you ideas on how to make your software better).

b) is a mistake. Here's why.

Don't ask people to suggest features for you

According to the jobs-to-be-done framework, we all want to accomplish something. And when you ask people with this in mind, you get much clearer answers on what they want.

The reason? Because you focus on the problem they have, rather than solutions. Questions like "what do you want from our product" focus on the SOLUTION, not the PROBLEM people have.

When you ask "what do you need from our product", you're asking people to evaluate:

• The problem
• Your product
• Come up with solutions for

Essentially, with questions like these you're asking people to invent product features for you. Which is not a good idea.

Here's one example:

Before the microwave was invented, people didn't really know if they needed a microwave. What they knew is that they wanted to minimize the time it takes them to prepare a meal (a job-to-be-done) or minimize the likelihood of overcooking a meal (another job-to-be-done).

People knew very clearly about their problem. And they could WHAT they want to accomplish.

It's YOUR job to come up with solutions

Another problem with asking people questions related to the product is that the mere mention of it alters its perception. This is the reason why psychologists do their experiments without telling people the purpose of it.

People are sensitive to how they leave an impression on others, and asking a question like “What do you think about the product/price?” or "How should we improve X" will get them in reputation-management mode and cause them to give you the answers you want to hear.

Now that we debunked one thing about getting users to tell you the truth, let's focus on another common (mis)conception: Can you find out what people want if you know more about tehir demographics?

Can You Predict Peoples Behavior Based on “Who They Are”?

The answer to this question has been an ongoing battle since 1968, when situationism emerged, a theory claiming that peoples’ behavior is mainly influenced by situational factors and not by personal traits (with intelligence being the exception).

Situationism caused the person-situation debate, which has been going on ever since. The current compromise of this debate can be summarized in one sentence:

Situational variables are more conclusive when it comes to predicting behavior in specific situations while traits are more descriptive of patterns of behavior that influence behavior across situations.

We are always in a certain situation when buying something. People often take life as it comes, and when they find themselves in a certain context, they start looking for solutions.

Founders and marketers often segment their customers according to demographics, psychographics and other traits that stay relatively stable over time. Yes, those traits tend to correlate with behavior, but do they actually cause it?

You don’t need research to tell you that buying behavior changes more often than demographics, for example. Just take two different neighbors with two same demographic profiles, owning very different types of cars.

Or take a 179cm tall single woman living in Phoenix buying an iPhone. Yes, all of these characteristics can correlate with people buying iPhone, but they don’t cause the purchase. Rather, they’re just one of many factors that can contribute to a specific situation that will cause the person to want to buy a product (the fact she’s single may cause her to want to appear classy when going to nightclubs, thus buying a luxury phone).

I’m not saying you should ignore your customer’s demographic profile, just see it as a proxy to understanding something more fundamental (the context of the purchase)

What I recommend is that you switch from grouping people from “demographic segments” to situational segments. A situational segment is all about context, it’s about me being stuck in the elevator and unable to get out, or my phone just breaking (more examples are provided in this great article from DePaul University). Each of these situations is caused by specific triggers.

Discover Hidden Reasons Why People Buy With Situational/Trigger Segments

A situation is “a particular point or period of time when something happens”.

And when that something happens, people are prompted to look for solutions.

One bank, for example, one day noticed a huge influx of newly opened accounts in a specific branch. When they asked those new customers what led them to open the account, their answer was unexpected: A competing branch nearby closed and they needed a new place to deposit their savings.

Or take the example of a scuba diving shop which interviewed some new customers and discovered a big majority of them were couples that were engaged and planning a wedding trip (they were not diving enthusiasts, which the company thought were their main customers).

A bank and a scuba diving shop. What do these two businesses have in common and what does this have to do with timing? The customers that bought these business products were at a particular point of time when something happened in their life that triggered them to get the product. All customers experienced one or more “trigger situations” before making a particular purchase.

Do you know what trigger situations people experience that cue them to obtain your product? I bet many of you don’t. To find out, you first need the right type of questions which we’ll explore later. The end goal is to identify the temporary situations that cause people to change and buy something.

Remember that people experience situations, and those situations drive needs (jobs to be done).

The situation comes before the need. People don’t often wake up and say “I need to lose weight!” Instead, they’re being “pushed” by some event, like seeing how much they weigh on the scale, a friend commenting how overweight they are and so on.

Often, knowing just the situation alone makes the needs created out of the situation pretty apparent. Take the B2B market.

In B2B sales, there’s a concept called “trigger events”, things like a job change (new CFO coming on board), a company getting new funding or adopting a new technology. Marketers track these changes because they know that when they happen, the company is much more likely to change the status quo (their current vendor).

After all, status quo is your biggest competitor in sales, not your actual competition. Being the new CFO/CEO, marketers know that the new person on the job will want to make immediate changes to the company, proving his worth. One of the ways to do that is to buy more cost-effective or modern software for a particular division.

Targeting these situational changes is a lot more predictive than targeting company sizes with specific employee count or characteristics. For example, if you make conferencing software, then I bet “companies building new conferencing rooms” would be a much better target than “small companies with many conferencing rooms”. The first is changing the status quo, something that happens temporarily at a particular period of time while the second is a state that could have been true for years.

What are the trigger events that cause people to buy your or your competitor products? It’s much easier to target people based on these situational segments than on demographic/psychographic ones.

To find those segments, there are some really nice questions that can help you find what happened in people's lives that caused them to come to you. You’ll be essentially rewinding time.

One sneakers manufacturer discovered that the situation that made people want to buy their sneakers was that when they got on a new field, they figured they couldn’t use their current sneakers. So they figured a way to contact the people that worked with those players on the new fields, and when the player found that they couldn’t use the current speaker, the employee was the first to mention this company’s product. That is being at-the-right-place-in-the-right-time.

You may also discover that the people who purchase your product are totally different from the ones you thought they were. A souvenir shop found that most people purchasing their products were not tourists. They were former residents re-visiting their city. If the shop decided to do some marketing and didn’t find this out, they’d wasted thousands of dollars on promotion to the wrong audience.

One positive thing about situations is that people are actually interested in telling you about them. What’s the last time you’ve read someone post on a tech support forum: “Hello, I’m 29 years old, Asian, married with 3 kids…oh and by the way…my phone won’t turn on!!” Situational factors are outside elements and people love to talk about. Their life story and circumstances? Not so much.

What causes trigger events?

A trigger event is not a thought. It is a change in circumstances that happens briefly.

A balding man may think about re-growing his hair but may not do anything about it until some event happens, like getting a divorce. That event will start a chain of actions (he’ll get a new shampoo, sign up to classes to meet new people etc.).

I’m not saying that thoughts don’t matter, just don’t put as much importance on them as the situational factors. In psychology, there’s something called fundamental attribution error, and it’s a predisposition for humans to put too much emphasis on personality characteristics when explaining someone’s behavior.

Think of the last time someone cut you off in traffic. Most people assume that person was being a jerk/had some negative traits. Chances are, there could have been thousands of different situational factors that influenced him, like him being very late at a work and failing to get on time resulting in him being fired.

Don’t make the same mistake with your customers and assume they bought a product only because they have certain personality traits. Thoroughly examine the outside situation as well.

The other advantage of focusing on situations is that you can influence them, unlike personality traits which are very hard to influence.

There are 3 categories of events that can cause change (I found these in articles on B2B, but they could easily be applied to B2C as well):

-Some transition/change. A change in people/priorities/locations. Examples: Change of a CEO, moving to a new location, returning from a trip, getting engaged, purchasing a car.

- Bad experience with a person/product/service. Often due to that person/company/product changing that creates dissatisfaction. Examples: a company dramatically changes the product you use that renders much less useful than before, a bad customer experience, a bad argument with a friend.

- Awareness due to an external circumstance. Examples: A recent trend making you change your hairstyle, a recent government regulation making you reconsider pricing.

These categories are good starting points. The important point is that people usually have an urge to do something after experiencing one or more of events related to those categories.

A job change may cause a new driving routine. Starting a plan for a vacation trip may prompt a thorough examination of car health. One research, for example, showed that 90% of all purchase decisions are made in the first 90 days when the new CEO/CFO/person responsible for purchases takes a new job.

I don’t have any data for personal events, like getting a marriage, returning from a trip or getting a child, but my guess is that the same principle applies there as well. People do a lot of things they wouldn’t otherwise do after experiencing a particular event (like getting married).

If you liked this article, you'll love part 2 where we'll talk more about jobs-to-be-done and how to be methodological about finding them.