Product Market Research Angst

And here we come to the biggest blocker in all of my previous attempts to start an online business.

How do I find out if people are willing to pay me what I would like to get paid for the thing that I am thinking about making?

All the steps to get there seem onerous, and far off, and I am inundated with a constant sense of pointlessness.  I’m going to spend hours or days making this website or landing page or whatever, and I won’t even get enough traffic to it to find out that people don’t want to buy what I’m selling.

And in this case, as I am working on two separate things at the same time, I find that I am getting stuck twice as much.

Figuring out our process for how to validate an online product is hard.  But just compiling a list of prospective clients for my new consulting venture seems like absolute torture.

Who am I that anybody is going to listen to me?

I don’t have enough public notoriety.  I’m not a public figure.  How do I get my foot in the door?

How do I get them to take me seriously?

I guess the only way is to demonstrate a very high level of competence and confidence…

But at this stage, I do not yet have a full plan of attack.  I first want to validate that the market could actually pay what I want to make if I was able to get the results I think we can eventually drive (and that I am committed to driving) after the first client engagement.

Making it specific

Why don’t we make our plans specific?

That would make it something you can actually do.  I am hiding my fear of going into a meeting with an executive at a large company behind a whole lot of tasks I have to get done first, before I do that.  

My experience of this situation is a kid who got called to the front of the class on the day he hadn’t done the reading, and has no idea how to answer the questions the teacher is throwing at him.

Is that actually what it will be like?  Will it actually be quite such a harrowing experience?

All I really want to do is validate that people are willing to pay a lot of money for a phenomenal amount of value generated, which is 90% me asking them questions.

What we have to offer

Hiding in all these delays and deferrals and excuses is simply the fear that I don’t really have anything particularly unique or interesting or valuable to offer the world.  

And even if I did, nobody would recognize it.

So again – why should you try?

What’s a better way of looking at this situation…?

Maybe I don’t.  But maybe I do.  Maybe if I went and actually did the things, I would find out that I had something to offer that people found both valuable _and_ surprising.  That they genuinely hadn’t thought of something in just that way before.

And if I do have something to offer, maybe they’d find it very valuable and would be able to get enough out of it that I could in turn achieve my own goals.

Maybe.  Maybe…. Maybe.

There are few definites in life, and courage is living in a maybe, because that maybe is terrifying.  It’s where you have indeterminate path complexity.  Things can blow up and your life can change in a maybe.  That’s scary.

I suppose that is what we are aspiring to – adventure.