How to attract the right users to your startup

When we started working on our startup, I was under the usual self-delusion all us entrepreneurs fall under — “we are working on the web’s next big thing and we’re going to change the world.”

Naturally I figured our target market was made up of everyone, because after all, everyone is on Facebook, and we’re going to be the next Facebook!

So I started marketing our startup to my inner circles — friends, family and associates — and to my dismay, I was met with a mostly mute response. Sure, I got lots of signups to my “beta invite list” but that would have just been because they know me personally and are interested in what I’m up to. Whether they had a real use for what our startup would offer was a completely different story. But for a short time I convinced myself they did.

Fast forward a couple of months and my beta list had screeched to a grinding halt at about 50 email addresses.

Time for a reality check.

“It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”

The quote above is pretty famous. It’s what Steve Jobs told Newsweek in a 1998 interview, and for aspiring startups it’s a dangerous mantra. Sure, it worked perfectly with the introduction of the iPhone and iPad, but for 99.9 percent of us, we’ll never get that lucky.

As I worked carefully through who our early users will be, I made my way through this flowchart and I finally figured out that our target market had to be people actively looking for a product like ours.

It’s quite simple isn’t it? Target the people who are actively looking for a product just like yours to solve a problem they know they have. These people have cobbled together their own solution out of different parts, and are on the hunt for something better.

So where are these people? At the risk of stating the obvious, they’re on Google — and Google lets you pay to advertise on keyword searches via Adwords.