How to know upfront if your product will fail

In the previous post, I described two online products I developed in the past year. I challenged the readers to guess which product was a total failure that generated no sales and which went on to sell 20 copies and generates about 2 sales per week.

If you haven’t read the previous post which describes these two products, you should do so here. Which of these two products failed to get one buyer? Now I am going to reveal the failed product and why it did fail.

The wedding website service was the one that had no clients. The concept was a nice one, as the idea came to mind when I discovered my wife (then girlfriend) looking at a lot of wedding websites on Facebook. Although this site has a Page 1, Number 1 ranking on Google for its main keyword, had visits from about 50 people a day, a Facebook Fan page with over 800 fans, it still failed to get one client.

This came as a surprise to me but in retrospect after taking a closer look at the business model and the motivations behind a potential client, I came up with this explanation of why it failed and I would like to know if you agree with me.

Ease pain or cater to passion or forget it

What I found out is (and this is advice I have heard multiple times from different sources but I did not heed to it), It simply boils down to this one sentence, your product must ease your clients pain points or cater to an irrational passion of thiers. If it doesn’t do any of the two then you might as well forget about it and give up.

The products that meets either or both conditions are the most successful products in the world. An example of products that ease pain is weight loss or dating products. These products cater to the pain people wanting to look beautiful and attract the opposite sex.

Two examples of products that cater to a market with irrational passion is the Apple consumer market or the World of Warcraft Game series. The customers of these products are so passionate that they would buy almost any accessory that complements their devices.

Why the Wedding website service failed

Now let me get back to the two products in question and relate this two conditions to them. The wedding services market is obviously one that falls into the irrational passion category. Bride-to-be’s would do anything to get the best wedding dress, wedding cake or wedding photography. If you offer great products in these categories, you will do well.

A wedding website comes at the bottom of the list when it comes to priorities and the list of things that make up a perfect wedding. At a price point of about $500, this is one consideration that the bride-to-be might decide against. At best, it is kind of the icing on the cake.

Now, if I were to offer website design services to wedding vendors to help them market their products better, that would be a successful product if marketed well because this eases the pain of the vendors having no clients for their services.

Why SAP Unveiled is a success

This brings me to the SAP Unveiled website which is a membership site that gives information to people looking to break into the field of SAP and how best to go about it, using social media, personal branding and finding companies that will hire newbies to train them. I discovered that there were so many posts in all the forums i visited and the two main questions were. “How can I get an SAP job without experience?” and “How do I choose which module to go for?”. This obviously was a pain point for many of these people and I knew I could give them an answer.

I launched the site and had about 10 people sign up in the week of the launch and every week I get two new sign-ups. At $29, it is not a lot but for my very first product on the internet, I think I am doing well, that is still $240 a month which can be improved by tightening up the sales funnel and optimization.

The end game is to be useful to your client. They need to see your product and say to themselves, “That is what I need right now, this will solve my problem”. If you can get them to say that and with some good marketing in the background, your job is so much easier and you will have a successful business.

Please let me know your thoughts, even if you disagree. Let’s discuss it

To be sincere, I thought there would be more comments on the initial post especially with the $20 iTunes Gift certificate for the winning comment. I guess this is a wake-up call to promote this blog better. Anyway, the winning comment goes to MK Akan who made a series of good points about which product failed. Although it wasn’t the correct assumption, technically it was the winning comment. Thanks MK!.