

Why you should attract "the Normals" - inmygarage
http://spencerfry.com/attracting-normals

======
patio11
Rather little How in the How To here. That's unfortunate.

Here's my top five:

1) SEO and AdSense. Learn 'em. Really, this could be points one through five.

2) Focus your marketing attention on the pain point your software/service
addresses and how their lives will improve as a result of using it (benefits),
not on what your software/service does (features).

3) Instrument freaking _everything_ and remove _anything_ which causes more
people to fail at whatever the core task of your application is. If you do
this, you will find places where your view of the world is so different from
your users' that you could not possibly predict what their issue would be.
e.g. for the significant percentage of your users who think Google _is_ the
Internet.

4) Email is the single best way to maintain your relationship with someone
when they're not on your site, which is most of the time.

5) About 1 million people Tweet. Some 3 millionish people subscribe to
Techcrunch. Twenty million voted for Ross Perot. Please recalibrate your
understanding of what broad mainstream appeal is.

~~~
spencerfry
My article is in no way focused on "how to" attract normals. This is simply an
opinion piece on why you should _focus_ on Normals rather than techies and
early adopters. I just saw this post on Hacker News and I did not select the
title. :)

~~~
patio11
D'oh, you're right. I didn't even see your H1 tag -- my brain mentally skips
them on the assumption they match the HN title, as is the case 99.99% of the
time.

In addition to your rationales, which I largely agree with, I'm sort of
partial to "People who are normal pay money for things, even things not made
by Apple, even in prices above $1.99."

~~~
spencerfry
Totally agree with that. Normal folks are happy to drop $10-25 or more a month
for products that they like, enjoy, need, etc. While a lot of my entrepreneur
friends are pretty stingy when buying products and things online unless they
really _need_ them. It's quite comical, because most of us sell products
online. :)

~~~
aarghh
This is a fascinating statement, and I have found it to be very true in the
sample space I have seen. My hypothesis is that a large number of
entrepreneurs tend to be highly analytical, and therefore focus on value and
utility. Most people though tend to spend money due to an emotional response,
and therefore are happy to make the purchase.

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kingkawn
Most groups would designate anyone outside as Others. In this case, because
hackers seem to enjoy thinking of themselves as the outsiders, we're calling
anyone else Normals. All well and good for us, but within the Normals there
are incredible numbers of groups with their own preferences. To target the
Normal is to disregard that it only exists from your perspective.

~~~
spencerfry
I think you're missing my point. Find a large group of less Internet savvy
folks to target and build a product for them. Pulled from my article:

1\. Normals stick around a lot longer and are far more loyal than early
adopters.

2\. Normals are friends with other Normals, which propagates the cycle.

3\. The Normals group is a larger market than the early adopters and techies
group.

4\. Normals appreciate simple, so it's easier and less time consuming to build
a product for them.

Further reading on Chris Dixon's blog:

<http://cdixon.org/2010/01/22/techies-and-normals/>

~~~
mstevens
I agree with you in that it could be a good market segment to go for, but I
think there's a lot of potential value in other market segments.

For example, the ISP I use targets technical users, and they seem to be doing
quite nicely.

~~~
spencerfry
Oh. There's certainly room for building products/services for technical users.
A lot of people do that well and make a lot of money doing just that. It's
just a lot more difficult to penetrate the market and there's less room for
massive scale. Your users are inherently more tech savvy, will voice their
opinion far more often, and be a lot more critical of your service.

~~~
mstevens
True, true, I was just reacting to the "this is the only market segment anyone
is ever allowed to go for" tone.

------
fjabre
Pickup 'Crossing the Chasm' by Geoffrey Moore.

You have to initially market to early adopters and then assuming that's
successful you make the jump to the 'normals' by graduating your marketing
strategy.

It's a simple concept that many companies fail to implement.

------
gsaines
Nice work Spencer, great blog post as normal. I think you're right on with the
idea of marketing to "normals," or the "target market," whichever term you
feel more comfortable with. It's a really tough transition and one that
normally comes with compromises and alterations to the service/product. We're
just starting our journey across that chasm, and it's not easy. Your team's
design skills are far better than ours and it's a struggle to make everything
intuitive enough for most folks to say nothing of the product focus!

I had to chuckle fjabre, "Cross the Chasm" is what I was thinking as well as I
read this one. This is also referenced in Godin's "The Dip" (just to make sure
I cover all my buzz-worthy maven authors).

------
morisy
I dunno, I'd hardly call CarbonMade's users "Normals": Concept artists?
Fashion Stylist? Photographers?

Instead, I'd call that a good old-fashioned "target market." They don't seem
to be targeting the 99% SpencerFry calls out as "normals" of the Internet,
they're targeting maybe 2% of the Internet that doesn't happen to be early
adopters, which is just another 2% of the Internet (good advice, IMHO).

I guess it just seems to be (well intended!) misleading to encourage people to
attract this mass idea of a "normal" market when the market the company hits
is just as niche, but a different niche.

------
ecaradec
The issues with getting the normals to use your apps, is that the generally
won't search your product, neither listen or read about it because they don't
read blogs, techcrunch, etc...

They end up using products when some friends tell them about it. You should
focus on getting early adopters, without adding function that would fear
normals. I think it makes sense. (I read that somewhere, but can't remember
where - if someone had a link ? )

------
herdrick
_You can be the hottest startup on the block with 100,000 active early
adopters, but I'd trade every one of those users for Normals in all cases._

If its a one-for-one trade, that's a bad deal.

------
rmason
Based on solely the graphics alone is their definiton of 'normals' consist
solely of 12 year olds?

I am serious. I know plenty of otherwise intelligent, web challenged 'normals'
who would be embarrased to be seen using this site. Least the ones over the
age of fifteen;<).

~~~
spencerfry
<http://carbonmade.com/examples>

Some examples of what the actual portfolios look like.

------
anonjon
_"Another telltale sign is that instead of going directly to web pages, they
use the search bar."_

I've seen this as a 'test' for the unsophisticated user a couple of times, and
I don't understand the reasoning behind it.

I do almost all of my web navigation via search-bar and auto-complete.

It works quite well (this particular Facebook page is weird though).

This is mostly because I don't like managing bookmarks (Bookmarks get too
cluttery if you actually use them as bookmarks... I only use them for
temporary stuff like saving pages for a product i'm researching).

If I really want to find something and I can't remember the name of the site
(which is a rarity), I'd just use browser history or search for keywords
anyway...

I think that there is something ergonomically wrong with the way that we name
websites. <http://news.ycombinator.com/> does not stick in my head (it does
not come to mind first anyway). "Hacker News" totally does, and it is easier
to type.

I think that implying people are unsophisticated when they are really just
lazy/apathetic about specific technical details leads you to the wrong
conclusions about what type of things they can handle.

~~~
swernli
I think you have a good point about the test not being perfect. But I think
your explanation is a great example of what such basic tests are really trying
to get at: people's usage habits reflect their level of knowledge. I agree
that the reasons you bring up are valid, and to use the search bar for those
reasons shows your grasp of the technology. There are pleny of people who use
the search bar instead of the address bar because they just plain don't
understand the address bar. Their reasons are the complete polar opposite of
yours, but the end result is the same or very similar usage pattern.
Unfortunately, like so much in life, it takes a lot more than a simple test to
accurately determine the "why" behind an action instead of just measuring the
"what."

~~~
swernli
Here is a long, only tangentially related story about the computer usage
habits of "normals" where the action, a system restart, is much less an
indicator of the problem than the reason...

I was getting together with a bunch of high school friends after our first
year of college. We were chatting about our experiences, and as tended to
happen around myself and my computer savy friend, discussion of computer
problems started. One person began sharing a problem that they have with their
laptop where for some reason the keyboard "gets messed up" and numbers start
appearing instead of letters. I thought it was amusing, until I was shocked to
hear not one but three more people jump in and share that they've had the same
strange problem. These weren't dumb people either, just not tech savy folks. I
was about to explain the concept of numlock to them, when one of the people
pointed out that the problem could be fixed with a reboot, and advised the
others to try it the next time they encountered the issue.

As I said, not stupid people. Most of them were at ivy league institutions and
have gone on to successful careers. They don't know jack about computers.
These are the "normals" we have to make sure not to forget when we design
software.

