I’ve always been amazed (and a little worried) when a business owner will jump to fund a project that has an ambiguous success metric or vague pool of potential users aka customers. When you kick around an idea for a new website or web-based service, it’s extremely helpful to view your potential users and customers as a tiny percent of a very large group that has been filtered down to include only relevant people.
In this way, your pool of users is much like the French invasion of Russia. When Napoleon first departed his home turf, he had a combined army of over 650,000 troops at his disposal. As the army marched towards their goal of St. Petersburg, they had to cross rivers and deal with increasingly cold temperatures which made the troops sick and disrupted supply logistics. Each river and temperature decrease acted as a barrier, causing Napoleon’s army to lose men to famine, disease and starvation. In fact, he shed 50,000 men in just the first two days of the march.
If you look at the graphic above, you’ll see how the tan line is fat on the left, representing the full army that departed, narrowing at rivers and temperature drops. Just as those things whittled away Napoleon’s army, so too can a website’s pool of customers be turned away by limiting factors. In Napoleon’s case it was logistics & disease, in your case it may be software errors, poor usability or price issues.
Let’s put it in perspective with a real example – we can speculate about the limiting factors of a website that takes your digital pictures and lets you print them on things like coffee mugs and mouse pads. When asked who a potential customer of such a site is, you might be tempted to say “anyone!” … because who doesn’t want a cool photo book or something, right?
Imaginary Service: A Website that helps you print your photos on products
Limiting Factors:
- Who do we have the ability to sell this to?
- US customers: 308 million people
- Who has a digital camera?
- Ballparked at 40 million americans in 2008.
- Who has internet access?
- Approximately 46% of those Americans.
- Who wants to print photos?
- A generous estimate: 30% of the aforementioned people.
- Who is willing to upload photos?
- A small percentage of the aforementioned people
- Who is willing to learn to use the site/service?
- A small percentage of the aforementioned people
- Who finds the price acceptable?
- Fewer still …
- Who trusts your Brand, website and/or payment gateway?
- Even fewer …
- Who of all these people will see your advertising and marketing and respond to it?
- A truly small number
* Napkin math: take figures very loosely.
So, as you can see, with just a few seconds of critical analysis, we have narrowed the list of potential customers from a number in the hundreds of millions to one that is probably in the hundreds of thousands – in a best case scenario. The exercise isn’t intended to be used as a tool to dissuade anyone from starting a project, but it should help project leaders frame their idea in basic reality. So, before you leap to fund the next spurious facebook app or complex group/social collaboration site, consider your project’s maximum potential with a skeptic’s eye.
At the very least, an exercise such as this can help just about anyone understand the need for simplicity and relevance above all else. Your project comes with enough limiting factors built in, you don’t need to add any more. Stay on the lookout for confusing business requirements, extraneous user experiences and technical errors.
