Creating an online Product or Service

Creating an online Product or Service

Wants VS. Needs

Working from home on your online business may meet your needs but what about your customer. You’ve heard it plenty of times – find a market with a problem, find their solution, and throw yourselves in their path so that they throw their money at you, online businesses can benefit from this very good advice. However, let’s break this down further since essentially what we are referring to is meeting a customer’s wants and needs.

You see sitting at home the problem is that it’s easy for our ego to get in the way when we start a business. We may know what a customer needs and so we set off to create that product or service. Then we are completed befuddled when no one is on our online web site buying our product.

What happened? We didn’t create a product that people WANTED.

Creating ebooks or any other form of online business you may run from home is just the same as any other business.

If you decide to create a business that meets people’s needs, you better also be sure that these people want your solution.

For example, let’s suppose you run into a specific population of smokers. They love gathering on Saturday nights on their front porches, enjoying good company, their favourite beverage, and a pack of Marlboro Reds.

The problem is, this particular group has a history of lung cancer in their families. And due to the long history of smoking each of these people has, coupled with the large number of cigarettes they smoke each day, you know they are walking a dangerous path health-wise.

What do these people NEED? This particular group needs to quit smoking before they meet their untimely ends. But if you attempt to market a stop-smoking product to them, you’re the one likely to meet an untimely death. Quite simply, this particular population of smokers doesn’t want to quit, so you’re wasting your time and money trying to sell that sort of product to them.

At this point you have a choice:

1. You can find a market of smokers who DOES want to stop smoking, and sell them your product.

2. You can figure out what your “porch smokers” actually want, and sell it to them (discount cigarettes come to mind).

3. Or you can just choose another market and product.


You can see this same sort of example playing out across many different populations, especially in regards to health. For example, you may find overweight people who need to lose weight, but they want clothes that make them look slimmer, not an online exercise program. Or you may find teenagers that need a dependable car, but the teenager is more interested in what the car looks like as opposed to whether it will need costly repairs.

Sometimes the product you are putting on the market is so revolutionary that people have yet to realize they need or want it. In that case, if you decide to proceed you will likely spend a lot of time and money educating your potential customers. This is one of those cases where being second into the market may be more beneficial, since your competitor spent the time and money educating the market, and now you can swoop in and get your market share.

For example, marketer John Reese was one of the first people to come out with an autoresponder. People didn’t realize they needed it, and they for sure didn’t want it. In fact, they didn’t even know what it was. As such, John and his closest competitors had to educate the market before he could sell autoresponders.

Now of course when you say “autoresponder” most people want it for their business plus they tend to need it if they’re running a mailing list. Even though the competition may be tough, at least if you entered that market now you wouldn’t need to explain to potential customers why they wanted and needed your autoresponder service.

So what’s the bottom line? Know your market! No matter who you are marketing to and what product or service you’re putting out, if you want to succeed make sure your market wants what you have. Better yet, make sure your market DESPERATELY wants your product!