How to discover the audience insight that could make or break your startup

The following is an edited excerpt from Shortcut Your Startup by Courtney Reum and Carter Reum. The excerpt is provided by Gallery/Jeter Publishing. You can buy a copy of the book here.

We always tell people that when we look at any business that was crazy successful, it stemmed from a single meaningful insight.

It’s an “aha” moment that is less than obvious but makes a ton of sense when you hear it. The deeper and better your insight, the better your business will be.

Often an insight is something fundamental about a group of people’s proclivities, desires, or pain points. Howard Schultz’s insight was that Americans were craving a “third place” between work and home where they could have a sense of community and meet for conversation, like the Italian cafe. That was the seed of Starbucks. Larry Page and Sergey Brin had an insight about the way people search for information – the most common searches and most often chosen answers being considered the most accurate – leading to Google.

How to look for insights

There are patterns to look for to generate insights. Typically, they fall into one or more of the following categories:

• New behaviors. What are people, particularly early adopters, trying, tasting, liking, and buying for the first time? Can you spot the waves forming?

• Life hacks and MacGyver fixes. Ever used a paper clip as a collar stay? That’s an example of a small hack – a creative solution in the moment. Where are people using these “duct tape”-type solutions in their lives? Can you provide what they’re looking for?

• Resources that were once abundant but now are scarce. Capitalism can be wasteful when it comes to abundant resources. Inherently, valuable goods are treated as precious and less expensive goods are tossed to the side. But the value of things can change and often does. Can you notice any process in which there’s a by-product that could be made more valuable than it is now?

Consider the guy who “invented” baby carrots. In the mid-1980s, Mike Yurosek became tired of throwing away 400 tons of carrots a day in his Bakersfield, California, processing plant. They were too bent or broken to sell, so he first used them to feed his pigs. When their fat turned orange from eating so many, he decided to see if he could sell the discards somehow.

At first, he shaped them by hand with a potato peeler. Then he bought an industrial green bean cutter, which happened to cut carrots into two-inch-long pieces. And voilà, baby carrots – and a whole new industry – were born. Mike’s insight was partially inspired by his desire to avoid food waste, as well as by his ability to break the conventional belief that people wanted carrots of only a certain size.

What started with an issue in the trenches became a learning experience, which led to a bankable business for an innovative product subcategory, one that many other companies would later enter. None of that would have come to pass if Mike hadn’t been in the trenches, thinking about what he was observing. Whereas many people focus on seeking information, successful people seek insights.

Find that insight early

Photo credit: imagincy / 123RF Stock Photo

How to find insights