Are You Creating A Product That Nobody Needs?

In: Business Ideas By: Brian Armstrong

29 Nov 2008

The easiest products to sell are those that solve a BURNING desire. What do people lay awake at night thinking and dreaming about? What do they have an intense fear or irrational fantasy about?

The three most popular are probably these:

Health If you can barely get out of bed, have an intense headache, or worse yet…have several months to live, what amount of money WOULDN’T you be willing to give to make it go away?
Wealth Everyone has irrational fears and fantasies regarding money. It keeps us up at night.
Relationships Everyone has a strong desire to be loved.

A lot of first time entrepreneurs make the mistake of creating a product that people don’t DESPERATELY need. They create something that they think is cool, but no one else even knows to look for.

Maybe it’s a book about their life story. Maybe they want to become a fashion consultant. Maybe it’s a dog grooming service.

Nobody lays awake at night thinking “GOSH if only I could find a better dog groomer my life would be better!!”. No, they are thinking about how they can be skinnier, richer, and get the cute guy/gal at work to notice them.

Even if people do spend money occasionally on non-essential products and services, these are the first expenses they cut when money gets tight or the economy goes down.

Of course health, wealth, and relationships aren’t the only ones. People have incredibly strong emotions regarding their children, politics, sports, sex, etc. These strong emotional reactions are what you’re looking for because they cause people to buy (it’s not as much logic as we’d like to think).

Whenever possible, it’s better to check whether people actually want the product BEFORE creating it.

How to know if anyone is looking for what you’re selling:

A quick way to check is with the Google Adwords Keyword Tool.

In just a few seconds you can find out that 300,000 people each month search for dog grooming services. But this pales into comparison to the 1.4 million searches each month for tutoring. That in turn is outpaced by the number of people searching for help with back pain at well over 2 million.

You’ll have an easier time if you pick a market where people are already desperately searching for a solution to their problem! It’s much harder to create something that no one knows about, and later try to convince them that they need it.

Until next time, keep breaking free!
Brian Armstrong

Tags: health, market, products, relationships, Wealth

10 Responses

caleb

November 29th, 2008 at 4:57 am

What about the effects of competition?

Instead of competing with the big guys in an industry they already dominate, why not pick a more obscure niche where you dominate by virtue of being the only competitor?

Unfortunately, it’s hard to find an obscure niche that satisfies peoples’ “desperate needs”.

Mathematically, you should be dividing the 2.74 million back pain searchers by the number of back-pain products, and compare that ratio with the 1.4 million searches for tutors divided by the number of tutor services.

I think the tutor niche would win, even though there is probably a lot more people lying awake at night worried about back-pain than there are worrying about finding tutors.

The beauty of Google is it puts even obscure niches in front of a massive target audience.

Side note: why is my name gray on the commentator list?

Brian Armstrong

November 29th, 2008 at 3:03 pm

Hi Caleb,

Yep…I see what you’re saying although I tend to still go for markets that are big with lots of competition. That just reassures me that people are out there spending money on it. If I think I can be a little better than whatever else is out there, this is better than picking a niche where no one spends money.

Regarding your name grayed out, it looks like a link was not provided on your first post this month. Hmm…I went in an added it but the top commentators list didn’t update. It may update overnight, if not…definitely on December 1st. Sorry about that!
Brian

Andy @ Retire at 40

November 29th, 2008 at 9:20 am

I recently found that keywords tool and was really interested to figure out what keywords people were using. I just tried a number of variations of a few different phrases and was interested in the results – not always what I thought it would be.

Brian Armstrong

November 29th, 2008 at 3:03 pm

Hi Andy, yep I was surprised on a few as well. For example “homework help” is far more popular than tutoring related keywords. “home based business” and “home business” are far more popular than “how to start a business” etc.

Matt Thomas

November 29th, 2008 at 3:49 pm

Another useful too is Google Trends: http://www.google.com/trends. It accomplishes something very similar but also indicates any seasonality or growing popularity over a given keyword.

This was sort of mentioned, but some other huge desires are beauty and weight loss. I guess these kind of fall into the relationships/sex/health category but these are also very good examples of burning desire needs.

Thanks for another helpful post, Brian!

Brian Armstrong

November 30th, 2008 at 2:40 am

Good tip I’d forgotten about that thanks Matt.

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Are You Creating A Product That Nobody Needs?

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