Étienne Garbugli - Find Your Market: Discover and Win Your Product’s Best Market Opportunity

Copyright 2021 by tienne Garbugli

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.

tienne Garbugli has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet Websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such Websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks. All brand names and product names used in this book and on its cover are trade names, service marks, trademarks and registered trademarks of their respective owners. The publishers and the book are not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. None of the companies referenced within the book have endorsed the book.

First edition

ISBN: 978-1-7771604-9-4

Proofreading by Joy Sellen

Cover art by Katarina Naskovski

This book was professionally typeset on Reedsy

Find out more at reedsy.com

To the entrepreneurs and innovators willing to take the risk of bringing new products to market.

The approach in Find Your Market was designed to be modular.

Not only is the book intentionally shortyoure trying to make progress, not read booksit can be broken down into different paths, each tailored to the specific needs of the situation you find yourself in.

In the first section, Getting Started, you will gain a better understanding of the situation your team is in. If your product currently has users or customers, youll be able to evaluate whether a segment of that audience could become the gateway to a broader market.

If you dont currently have customers or a user baseor if you dont think any of your customers could open market opportunitiesthe next section, New Markets, will help you flesh out the core value of your innovation, brainstorm markets worth exploring, and strategically evaluate the most promising opportunities.

Once you have identified a few markets that could be worth pursuing, Validating Your Findings will help you gain conclusive evidence that a market youre exploring is actually worth committing to (or alternatively, should be cast aside).

Once a market has been validated, the last section, Speed, will help you mold your positioning and go-to-market strategy to the segments that your team has chosen to focus on.

Throughout the book, youll find markers () indicating opportunities to jump ahead to more appropriate content, or suggestions to revisit specific exercises in the previous sections (). These markers, and the content under Troubleshooting, were designed to help ensure that youre making real progress commercializing your innovation.

I really hope you enjoy Find Your Marketits a book I really enjoyed writing.

I

Introduction

Everybody has a strategy until they get handed a big check. Karen Peacock, Intercom CEO

When I was a kid, I wanted to be an inventor.

Id spend hours in my room dreaming up inventions.

Sometimes these inventions became rough products made from discarded parts (read: trash), sometimes theyd turn into LEGO block constructions, but most times they stayed as drawings.

Id sometimes revisit those drawings to improve my designs, somehow convincing myself that adding details would bring these inventions one step closer to reality.

As I gained experience and the products I built evolved from LEGO bricks, to early websites, to fully-functioning technology products, two things became clear:

Innovation is a lot harder than it looks.

Theres a massive chasm between an idea and its adoption as a viable solution by real customers.

Sometimes things click. You have the right idea at the right time and youre able to share it with the right audience, simply.

Most times, however, the path from idea to commercialization and scale is a lot murkier.

There are countless examples of great technologies, ideas, or inventions that failed to gain traction.

However, if we take a deep look at many of the innovations that have failed to be adopted, we can see a clear pattern

According to CB Insights list of the top reasons why startups fail (or any similar studies really), the main reason why startups fail is: no market need.

Although theres value in similar simplifications, this reason should really read as no market need found before the team ran out of money and/or motivation.

As youll see throughout this book, given enough time, money, and willingness to iterate, any viable technology can ultimately find its use.

It was true with my first startup, Flagback, whose main competitors are still profitable and growing. It was true with my second startup, HireVoice, which could have become Officevibe or any of its numerous competitors. It was also true with my third startup, Highlights, which got acquired, but now faces much tougher competition.

At its core, technology solves problems. In general, the bigger the problems, and the more efficiently those problems are solved, then the bigger the payoff is for innovators.

When your starting point is a productor you have strong technological innovationyoure going backwards, trying to match a breakthrough to a market, pain point, use case, or Job to be Done.

This, is often viewed as having a solution looking for a problem. Its a challenge that tends to require a different approach to customer development

I wrote my first book, Lean B2B, the way an inventor would: I wanted to solve my own problem, to find the most efficient way to get from idea to product/market fit (PMF) in B2B.

Through many iterations, Lean B2B became a book that could help entrepreneurs find early adopters, identify and prioritize business opportunities, convince business stakeholders to share pain points, create a minimum viable product, and iterate until theyre able to find PMF.

Thankfully, I wasnt the only one facing these challenges. As the book grew in popularity, the content got introduced to accelerators, consultants, intrapreneurs, universities, and government agencies.

Now the book is used by startups, governments, consultants, large companies, students, and other interest groups outside the audience that I originally planned to serve.

This has created challenges. Many entrepreneursor other types of innovatorsdont get to start their innovation process with a blank slate. They either start with a technology, an idea, or business requirements, or they have parts of a working product that they try to get growing. Adapting the Lean B2B methodology to these situations forces a certain leap, and as Ive seen with many entrepreneurs, leaps introduce new risks.

Deciding which market opportunity to focus on is a major decision that can significantly impact the success potential of a new venture. Its my strong belief that by clarifying the process of finding the right market for an innovation, the survival rate of new enterprises will increase significantly.

Much like books, technology products can provide value to different audiences.

The more generalized or general-purpose a technology is, the more distinct market opportunities there usually can be: