The Minimum Viable Audience - your super fans.
The underrated relevance of your innovator audience.
It is only but natural to think of a product you're working on as the best of its class and with an expanding view of its capabilities. Essentially, mentally flying from a short-term and viable "what could be" to an all encompassing and delusional “what could be”. This is a natural effect of motivated reasoning, a kind of cognitive bias that all humans are prone to make, by default.
In the only thing that matters, Andreesen emphasizes that product-market fit (PMF) is the most critical factor to startup success. When starting a new project, builders and people who are drawn to great products, are naturally inclined to focus on what the the solution will look like (or do) “the product”, making it easy and natural to lose track or underestimate the other, and equally important part of the PMF puzzle, “the market”.
But, even when we are market-aware, as product managers, whether by training, or because of an external push such as a friend, investor, coach, or stakeholder who asks “how are you going to make money?” followed by “who is going to pay for that and why?”, we are inclined to have an expansive view and look for a good reason to say “as many people as possible”, and if we’re not wary of our innate push towards motivated reasoning, we may be fast and certain to make up and conclude that our target market are large “potential” audiences, akin to starting at the top of the total addressable market (TAM).
My point is—when looking to innovate, rather than thinking of addressable markets, no matter if it’s TAM, SAM, or SOM, we should instead look into the first 2.5% of people who will use your product according to the innovation diffusion theory as the early answer to “who is this product for?”. These people are the “innovators” also known as super fans by Amy Jo Kim and as high-expectaction customers (HXC) by Julie Supan.
While your super fans will probably not help you make money, and they will certainly not be the target audience that will make your business model work, technically speaking, for simplicity, early on, you should think of them as your target audience, specially for design purposes. I will talk about the importance of audiences in design more in depth in another post, but the point I want to make here is that we should always be building for someone, and that someone, before product-market fit, should be your super fans. Everyone across the organization should be aligned on who these super fans are and you should try to bring them in close to the product early and often, until further on when people are asking for your product (eg. having a market pull).
When creating something that doesn’t exist, it’s often hard enough to find one person who cares about it and genuinely wants to “hire” your product. Considering how many assumptions you’re probably basing your reasoning on, and how complex your product is; saying who your larger audience is, and designing your product around how you think they think (meta guessing), is non-sense. But we do it either way, because we need a good answer to the question “who is your customer?”. We have to start somewhere, and we’d all like to start somewhere good, when possible.
Instead, start with a few assumptions that answer “who cares a lot and why?”. These assumptions, if framed correctly, should point you towards your super fans. Start with your super fans and try to make them …super… happy, they are well positioned to teach you the most about your product at this stage. Before product-market fit, you’d rather have a few super-happy super-fans, than an imaginary slice of a super valuable market.
When you find them, if they really are your super fans—meaning that they absolutely love your product and would be very disappointed if it didn’t exist—they will be so excited about the problem you are solving that they will be willing to help you build the solution. They will be as interested and as personally invested as you in having the solution materialize, so you should bring them in as partners in your design process, they will be happy to partake.
There are many ways to do this, but to keep things simple, I suggest first screening them with Amy Jo Kim’s super-fan 5 discovery questions (adapt as needed), and then embedding them into your product development cycle. For example, you could show the new iterations to them every 2-3 week sprint and use their feedback to inform your next build cycle.
I would say that with five (real) super fans who share the same traits in relation to the problem you’re solving, you can already build enough momentum to reach your early adopters, who may already be willing to pay for a solution. You early adopters are your super fans + more people who also care but need a more polished product before adopting it. Every case is different but your project may be able to survive at this point, and that’s usually what you’ve been aiming for since the beginning.
There are many methods to conduct user research professionally, but if you are short on resources, you can go a long way in learning about the problem/solution by just being humble and using your intuition. With those things in mind, just continually keep trying to make them happier and you’ll be on track to solving the right set of sub problems of the PMF puzzle early on, hopefully giving both the same relevance:
Who is the market? → Who cares and why? → Start with your super fans (Minimum Viable Audience).
What is the product? → What should I build? → Start with an idea. (Minimum Viable Product).
Personally, as an indie hacker, I made the mistake of showing my prototypes to anyone who would listen, because I was often forced into scrappiness due to lack of resources, and although that helped with improving the usability of the product, it just made things worse in terms of understanding the market and their needs, often leading to Frankenstein-like products that made no one happy in an effort to make everyone happy. In other words, showing prototypes to non-fans helped me make the solution better in some way, but it made things worse in understanding the problem space.
Before you have product market fit, most of the value generation comes from having a deep and comprehensive understanding of the problem. “The search” is more about the underlying problem than about any specific solution. Problems are often more complex than they first seem once you start breaking them apart.
To find your super fans, who will help you understand the problem you need to start somewhere, so make a set of hypotheses, rank them, and try to prove them or disprove them.
Here’s how I formulated these hypotheses for a new project:
Write down a one sentence short and simple explanation of your value proposition. In my case, I wrote “Fast access to summarized high-quality content about anything”. It simply captures what this is and what makes it special. Note that this doesn’t include the “who” part.
Then try to come up with a few outcomes, think social, emotional, and functional that happen when someone “hires” your “what”? For example, I wrote, people may discover new ideas (functional), impress their friends (social), and feel smart (emotional), but I wrote a few more.
Then write “who cares most” and make a list of audiences that could potentially care about your “what”. Try to separate this buckets of people based on demographics and/or behaviors. For example, I wrote busy growth-minded people, DIY fans, people who listen to podcasts frequently, and self-taught modern polymaths, among others.
Lastly, look at everything you wrote, and use your sense making and intuition. Then choose one or two audiences, if you have a team, make the guess democratic. You’re trying to find who your super fans are by guessing who cares about what you do based on the outcomes they get.
Iterate, improve, and evolve both your product and your market.
Note: It can happen that some day your product changes so much that your super fans no longer like it, and that’s ok. I’ve observed this phenomena with fresh and cool niche music that follows the MAYA principle when the band grows into the mainstream.
I suggest you write down what you’re going to do in a notebook and you make the habit of coming back to it regularly, this way you’ll help yourself re-focus on what matters and re-evaluate your approach and your progress. I had to learn this the hard way myself when I was working on solo projects.
Looking for your super fans, hypothesizing and iterating about who they are (systematically), giving them the importance they deserve, denoting them as your target audience company-wide, brining them in regularly and repeatedly, showing them your prototypes, and learning from them are underrated and often ignored activities that can help entrepreneurs navigate the problem space and help their ventures thrive and survive by creating valuable products that matter to someone somewhere.