My old marketing teacher always like to tell two stories to underline the challenges of finding of product/target fit.

First story was about this company he worked for that made these highly sophisticated air analysis instruments. The company had always imagined their target market where engineers.

But when they did some analysis of their clients they where surprised to find quite a lot of chimney cleaners buying it.

It was way beyond what they needed but they found it it made the chimney cleaners feel more sophisticated.

The other story he told was about this industrial soap company he had worked for. They had one series of soap that they where betting on. When sales failed they had lots of soap on stock they couldn't get rid of. But one of the guys in the lab had fooled around with this idea about putting this glimmer stuff into the soap.

My teacher always having a good intuition for opportunities knew a guy in the retail industry found out that young girls had been slowly but surely more aware of buying their own cleaning products in earlier ages than usually.

So what they did was to lower the dryness of the product, make it pink and put in the glimmer. And lo and behold they sold this stuff like candy.

Talk about a pivot.

My own experience in the advertising industry have had it's surprises too. The biggest one was that in Denmark Audi's where not primarily sold to the cool jetset that the advertising depicted but rather to successful plumbers, blackschmiths, restaurant owners. etc.

And this brings up an interesting question.

Do people still buy based on what they aspire to be?

One thing is for sure though.

You have to "run the program" before you can see what will happen.

"If you're planning to sell a paid SaaS product, this means finding early users, from day one if possible, who will pay."

I nearly fell into the trap of not charging from day 1 with my latest startup. I had set myself a deadline (to launch within November for the startup sprint), and November 30th was fast approaching. When the day came, the product was clearly not ready, but I had worked on it for 7 weeks which was 6 weeks longer than I wanted to work on something without getting feedback from my market. So I launched, and at the last minute I threw in the Paypal HTML code in the payments page. It paid off - I had a paying customer after 4 days.

I see lots of people creating products which are intended to be paid products but have a very long (many months) free beta period. I understand it is to get the product "right", but I think it is a very dangerous strategy, and in the spirit of the lean startup, it could result in a huge amount of waste.

Great article on the subject (also covered in The Four steps to the Epiphany by Steve Gary Blank). Concerning the pricing, he explains how to calculate the “bounding box” estimate.

Ask to your early adopters:

1) Assume it was free, how many would you use? (how much does it cost to deploy your product, even if it's free; is there a real neeed; etc...)

2) Assume it costs $1,000,000 how many would you use? (to get this kind of answer: WTF????!!!! The most we pay for this type of product is $50,000...you're done!)

> and perhaps pivot into a different product, one that people are actually willing to pay for.

Or of course pivot into a different market.

I think the hardest lesson to learn is that different people can value the same thing differently. The value of a product isn't just a product, but with respect to a user. It's not just the observed, but also the observer. You cannot evaluate it as a tuple of its qualities (particular features, price etc). You have to weigh each quality by the user's valuation it. And different users value them differently. It's seeming to me more and more that this summarises the entire startup problem.

As a developer, you have a clear idea of what features you want to add, how difficult they will be, how general they will be, and how cool they will be. You're not even evaluating it as a user, but as a creator. It's the difference between a novel that was interesting to write, and one that's interesting to read.

But even if you do manage to shift your perspective to being a user, you'll still only have one user's perspective. In fact, there isn't "a user", but a whole world of different situations, tasks, skills, equipment, knowledge and values - each of which counts as "a user", who will evaluate the qualities of the product different. e.g. for some users, a higher price makes it more valuable.

This is an incredibly obvious point, but it's one that I have to be constantly reminded of. Perhaps because the more deeply immersed I am in my work, the less evidence I have of other viewpoints (I can't see them, at best they're imaginary) so it's easy to not think about them. Or maybe I'm just excessively egocentric and solipsistic.

Different strokes for different folks. What might be right for you might not be right for someone else.

One solution is to imagine your ideal user (who'd love what you want to make anyway - whether they exist or not), and keep evaluating your product in terms of that person - including marketing. Users who are similar to that person will tend to fit themselves into the image. Guy Kawasaki (early Apple guy) talks about this. And that's what's happening in ThomPete's intriguing two examples.

Not to be a jerk swombat, but who are you? What are your credentials?

I want to read advice from people with real world success. You may very well be successful already, so state it. I'll buy into what you're saying a lot more.

P.S. This is not a personal attack. If it comes off that way, it's my fault and failing.