Too many markets...I want to go into all of them!

Someone recently asked me the following:

"If what you're developing can go in many different products, but you need a product to select a market, do the market research, diligence, and even look for partners with experience in that specific product space...what's a good way to go about that, and still keep yourself open to pivoting in the future?   For me, say you can go into the personal app space, or the healthcare transcription space, or the commercial IVR space, or license technology capabilities, or any number of others, the initial people I'd want to reach out to to bring on board or help are all different for each."

Good question.  Unfortunately, there's no easy, quick solution.  As soon as you have your core product somewhat defined, you (or someone from your team) should be doing a comprehensive market analysis, which looks at all possible markets.  For each market, one needs to assess the market size, how difficult is it to penetrate, what are the margins, how much does your solution benefit them, etc, etc.  Lots of work here!  If you're lucky, you can get a team of business students to do this, maybe even for free, but the timing has to be right w.r.t. their course series.  Or, you might be able to find a business student to do an independent study project, again, for free.  Other options exist as well.  But, before you do any of this, you must have a list of proposed product features to help you define potential markets.

Sometimes, an easy, low-hanging-fruit kind of market is obvious, and that's often a good starting point, even though it might not be a huge market or perhaps not a high-margin market, but it could potentially bring in some early revenue.

Get the product out the door and optimize later

This is a follow-on to my previous post on validating your market.  Entrepreneurs, especially engineer entrepreneurs, like to make that first product perfect.  It's nice to be a perfectionist and strive to make the best product, the most reliable product, with the right colors, or the right bells and whistles, etc.  But this will most likely come at the expense of time and money, and you might guess wrong on some of the features.  Build your first product (or service) and get it out the door.  Early feedback from customers is very critical, as it will tell you what you need to focus on for the next version.

Have you validated your market?

This post is a follow-on to this post where I asked "Are you solving a real pain?"  Entrepreneurs sometimes get caught up in believing in their own product so much that they really fail to validate the market before fully developing the product.  This also is sometimes referred to as "drinking your own kool-aid."  There are numerous ways to validate a market, depending on the type of product or service you are offering.  Let's say you want to offer a new widget for sale on the web.  Before you even spend a penny on developing it, how about spending a few bucks on a website that describes this widget, perhaps a little money to SEO it, and a button on your website that says "Click here for more info" and another button that says "Order Now" (which can return a polite message referring to order-backfill).  Even before you can fulfill any orders, you are collecting very valuable market data...all before you've spent a penny on developing possibly the wrong product.