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Liam helps to build digital products and product teams as a freelance product manager. Connect with him on LinkedIn.

Liam Smith

<p>Once upon a time I believed that to be a successful product manager, I simply had to create great products. The rest would fall into place, right? Not quite. I this post I&#8217;ll explain how I learned the importance of being obsessed with the market &#8211; the problems people are facing and the people facing them &#8211; in order to build products that sell.</p>
<p>For years I’ve helped my clients create new digital products and services for their customers. We threw terms like <a href="https://www.mindtheproduct.com/a-guide-to-product-market-fit/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">product/market fit </a>around, without ever really giving a thought to what they meant. But to be honest, I didn’t have a clue. Nor did I understand why some of the products I’d helped to create succeeded while others flopped.</p>
<p>Reality bit in January 2017 when I quit my job to start my own venture. I spent nearly nine months working on a meal planning app called Tinkerdash, which failed, delivering me exactly zero paying customers, and left me stressed out and almost penniless. Not one to give up, I tried something new and to my surprise, I achieved more in a few weeks than I had in the previous nine months  – a paying customer</p>
<p>What was different?</p>
<p>The first time around, I started with an idea, developed a solution and then tried to find customers. I created something nice but no one was willing to pay for it – there was no market. Sound familiar? The second time around, I started with a market. I stumbled upon a very specific problem and created a product that matched it pretty well, and that people were willing to pay for. I achieved product-market fit in just a few weeks, at a cost of less than £300 (and almost by accident).</p>
<p>Here’s how I did it.</p>
<h3>Step 1: What are People Interested In?</h3>
<p>In 2016, I <a href="https://www.habiliss.com/outsourced-diet-virtual-assistant/">outsourced my meal planning and grocery shopping</a> to a virtual assistant based in India, and it was nothing short of life-changing for me &#8211; almost overnight, Nandini (my assistant) helped me to eat better, save money and skip the supermarket queues.</p>
<p>This spurred me on to take notice of companies offering meal planning services &#8211; they ranged from major supermarkets to start-ups. Reading forums and blogs, I got a sense that people were interested in these kinds of services but I felt they fell short of what my virtual assistant did &#8211; some were full of poor recipes and some were too pricey, and they didn’t work for a household. But therein lay an idea – I’d help people with their meal planning.</p>
<p>I then used <a href="https://trends.google.com/trends/">Google Trends</a> to gauge the interest in meal planning. I found that it had seen steady interest over the past five years in the UK, my home market. If anything, interest was increasing slightly, and that was good enough.</p>
<figure style="width: 1012px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="//wp-content/uploads/2018/04/7e551eea-496d-468b-97af-eb61730dd82e_image11.png" alt="Google Trends showing interest over time for meal planning, in the UK" width="1012" height="546" /><figcaption class="wp-caption-text">Google Trends showing interest over time for meal planning, in the UK</figcaption></figure>
<p>So, by keeping an eye on external trends, which I also had some experience in, I’d found a topic that I wanted to pursue further. Pretty simple.</p>
<p>This is where I had stopped with my first venture. I made the mistake of trying to create a product for such a broad topic that I found it impossible to market and effectively competed against the major supermarkets. That was never going to end well.</p>
<h3>Step 2: What Specific Problem Could I Help to Solve?</h3>
<p>Keen to avoid the mistakes I’d made with Tinkerdash, I wanted to pinpoint a specific problem I could help to solve. I turned to Google again.</p>
<p>Each day, <a href="http://www.internetlivestats.com/google-search-statistics/">millions of people</a> share their deepest insecurities, problems and questions with search engines. And amazingly, Google (and others) give access to this information in the form of keyword research tools, such as Google’s <a href="https://adwords.google.com/intl/en_uk/home/tools/keyword-planner/">Keyword Planner</a>. Where better to start my research? I opened the Keyword Planner, typed in “meal plan” and hit Search. I got back a load of related terms along with the monthly search volume (i.e. popularity), competition rating and a suggested bid range (for adverts).</p>
<figure style="width: 1004px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="//wp-content/uploads/2018/04/2a742234-b2bc-4ce5-b745-60739668a08e_image12.png" alt="Google’s Keyword Planner showing results for meal plan" width="1004" height="561" /><figcaption class="wp-caption-text">Google’s Keyword Planner showing results for meal plan</figcaption></figure>
<p>After several hours clicking through hundreds of related terms, I’d created a comprehensive list of problems, questions and even a few product ideas. One stood out – bodybuilding meal plan. It had decent search volume along with relatively low competition and a bid range I could afford. Plus, there were a load more related keywords with the same qualities – enough to feasibly build a business around.</p>
<figure style="width: 1001px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="//wp-content/uploads/2018/04/5142b2e3-1394-4edd-9153-5ab9695f09ef_image13.png" alt="Google’s Keyword Planner" width="1001" height="591" /><figcaption class="wp-caption-text">Google’s Keyword Planner showing results for a bodybuilding meal plan</figcaption></figure>
<p>So, with the help of Google’s Keyword Planner, I’d potentially found a niche market &#8211; bodybuilding nutrition &#8211; and a specific need &#8211; meal planning &#8211; to focus my venture around.</p>
<h3>Step 3: Why is it a Problem and Could I Solve it?</h3>
<p>To understand why meal planning for bodybuilding was such a problem for people, and whether I could help solve it, I turned to a place where people openly express their problems and opinions – blogs and forums.</p>
<p>With the help of Google again, I found the online bodybuilding resource and forum <a href="http://www.bodybuilding.com">Bodybuilding.com</a>, as well as loads more blog articles on bodybuilding nutrition. And what a gold mine they were. Comments such as this one below highlighted that the ready-made plans available didn’t always work for people’s lifestyles:</p>
<p><img decoding="async" src="//wp-content/uploads/2018/04/d7d2f6a7-f73c-4987-b0cc-36ee1dec76cc_image2.png" alt="" /></p>
<p>And traditional meal planning methods often meant many more hours in the kitchen, to people’s dismay:</p>
<p><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter" src="//wp-content/uploads/2018/04/a5a13b8b-71d9-4c80-8702-bd7ffad23d8c_image5.png" alt="" width="1000" height="264" /></p>
<p>After more research, I grouped comments into themes and tallied up the frequency. What I learned is that people seemed frustrated with existing solutions because of three things:</p>
<ol>
<li>They didn’t suit their lifestyles</li>
<li>They weren’t tailored to their body or gym goals</li>
<li>They required a lot of extra time in the kitchen</li>
</ol>
<p>I also learned that people liked features such as ready-to-use shopping lists, weekly planners and nutritional information in their meal plans. From my own experience, I also added that any recipes would have to be quick and easy, and have fewer than eight ingredients to minimise cost. On top of this, I found that Bodybuilding.com allowed me to view people’s gender, age and location information. Sometimes even their body and gym goals too.</p>
<figure style="width: 1000px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="" src="//wp-content/uploads/2018/04/6ed84572-5d14-46a5-b843-769dc788945a_image7.png" alt="" width="1000" height="159" /><figcaption class="wp-caption-text">An example of the public information available in the popular forum</figcaption></figure>
<p>So, not only did I have a decent idea of their likes and dislikes, I also had an idea of who they were and what they wanted to achieve.</p>
<p>Based on all this information, could I create something that’d help these people? I was pretty confident I could. The question was whether anyone would buy it.</p>
<h3>Step 4: Do People Spend Money?</h3>
<p>I’d spent enough time with gym junkies to know that people spend an excessive amount on things that help them to look good. Take sports nutrition, <a href="http://www.mintel.com/press-centre/social-and-lifestyle/sports-nutrition-bulks-up-uk-market-sales-rise-by-27-in-two-years-as-one-in-four-brits-use-the-products">people spent £66 million on food and drink products in the UK in 2015</a>, up 27% from 2013. I’d also watched enough documentaries to know that bodybuilding is an obsession, which people are willing to go to extreme lengths to pursue.</p>
<p>Plus, the <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-36057783">rising popularity</a> of the meal kit industry, exemplified by companies like HelloFresh and Gusto, showed that people are willing to pay extra for convenience when it comes to food prep at home.</p>
<p>Despite all this encouraging information, I specifically wanted to know if people were likely to buy a bodybuilding meal planning product. My approach was to run a few adverts with <a href="https://adwords.google.com/intl/en_uk/home/tools/keyword-planner/">Google Adwords</a>, using my research to write the ad copy and explicitly stating a price. I figured that if people clicked on it, they were both interested and open to paying for it.</p>
<figure id="attachment_13006" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-13006" style="width: 300px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="wp-image-13006 size-medium" src="//wp-content/uploads/2018/04/a18a897a-32da-47dc-9bcd-694490365d08_image6-300x226.png" alt="Google Ads" width="300" height="226" srcset="/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/a18a897a-32da-47dc-9bcd-694490365d08_image6-300x226.png 300w, /wp-content/uploads/2018/04/a18a897a-32da-47dc-9bcd-694490365d08_image6.png 762w" sizes="(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" /><figcaption id="caption-attachment-13006" class="wp-caption-text">The three Google adverts</figcaption></figure>
<p>I also purchased a domain from <a href="https://uk.godaddy.com/">GoDaddy</a> and created a basic landing page using <a href="https://instapage.com/">InstaPage</a> to fit with Google’s T&amp;Cs. The results were surprising. Apparently, anything above a 2% click-through rate (CTR) could be considered <a href="https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2010/11/22/what-is-a-good-click-through-rate-for#Pay-per-click-ads">above average</a> for this type of ad. So that’s what I was aiming for.</p>
<p>The click-through rate for all three adverts was in excess of 7%, well above target! People seemed to be very interested in the product and not put off by the cost.</p>
<figure style="width: 1000px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="" src="//wp-content/uploads/2018/04/7d49ac5e-8d93-4f9d-bfad-7d16456ef1a5_image10.png" alt="Google Adwords dashboard" width="1000" height="332" /><figcaption class="wp-caption-text">Google Adwords dashboard showing advert click-through rates</figcaption></figure>
<p>What came next was relatively easy. I created a bodybuilding meal planning product, bodybuildingmealplans.co.uk or BBMP for short, using my research findings to determine the features. No guesswork involved. Then I created a basic sales funnel including the same advert, a landing page, sales page and basic email delivery system. Within a day I had my first sale and five more followed shortly after.</p>
<figure style="width: 1000px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="" src="//wp-content/uploads/2018/04/ad9b8e10-4554-4f4d-9b79-b98a719e5237_image9.png" alt="Stripe seller dashboard" width="1000" height="491" /><figcaption class="wp-caption-text">Stripe seller dashboard showing the meal plan sales (with one refund to an unresponsive buyer)</figcaption></figure>
<p>The process had worked!</p>
<h2>The Lesson</h2>
<p>In case you go looking, I later decided to retire my bodybuilding meal planning venture. Making sales is one thing, making a hugely profitable business is another – plus, more promising and lucrative opportunities were presenting themselves in my freelance consultancy business. But I’d learned a valuable lesson here: that you’ll have a much greater chance of building a product that sells if you become obsessed with the market, the problems people are facing and the people facing them. If you study them long enough, product ideas will emerge.</p>
<p>Do this in a market where people are spending money and you might just be on to a winner.</p>
<h2><span style="font-weight: 400;">Read more on Product/Market Fit</span></h2>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">To learn more about product/market fit – what it means, how to get to it, and what our role as product managers is in maintaining it, check out </span><a href="https://www.mindtheproduct.com/a-guide-to-product-market-fit/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">A Guide to Product/Market Fit.</span></a></p>
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More Than Great Products: A Journey to Product/Market Fit

Liam Smith

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