Remember in Chapter 1.4 when we went over TAM (total addressable market), SAM (service available market), and SOM (service obtainable market)?
SAM represents your customers 6 months to 1 year from now, whereas TAM represents your customers a year on from now and after.
SOM are those we consider your lowest hanging fruit and by that I mean, the people who will find value in your product and the customers who are obtainable TODAY.
Today being the keyword.
If you currently have some customers buying your product, great! Pull a list of all your power users, the most active consumers, and evaluate them. I’ll explain down below.
If you don’t yet have any buyers, you want to go back to the survey taken in the previous chapter and take a look at all the people who responded “yes” when asked if they would find value in your product. It’s then up to you to reverse engineer these people to see what they look like by the persona traits you asked.
When evaluating your power users, you want to figure out:
-Who they are
-What they look like i.e. age, job, lifestyle
-How they word their pain point(s)
-How big their pain is (scale of 1-5)
-Where they congregate online/offline to either become better at what they do
-Where they best learn new practices/ technologies
The goal here is to survey and ask these questions until you get some digestible data. You want to identify any themes or trends to understand who your customers are now.
Your ultimate goal is to answer this one question:
Who does my product/service serve the best today?
-What do they look like from a profiling perspective and where can I reach them?
You want to increase the number of your clients AS THEY ARE TODAY.
Your current consumer base is who will help you refine and better your product as you move on and begin selling to your SAM and TAM.
You might be asking why it’s important to invest so much time into your SOM since you’re ultimately trying to market to everyone. Well, here’s why.
There will be a constant tug of war between your product and sales. However, there's a cycle you must follow.
You need to find your first customers to start the selling process and from there, learn from them and build a better product. Once you've come up with this better product, you can expand your audience, get more customers, and learn from them again. You’re going to take your learnings to refine your product and repeat this process over and over again.
This process can only begin by understanding who your initial audience is. It's your job to understand your current buyers to help develop your product or service. By doing this, you expand your opportunities leading to more success when pursuing your future SAM and TAM.
Remember, it's all baby steps. Be sure that you're following through and not moving too quickly.
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