marketing, business-plan, website, target-marketThis is social-fashion website that will have UGC as main content. Stakeholders say it should work around the globe, target the whole world.
That sounds weird somehow, is that statement wrong? Shouldn’t we always be more specific, start small somewhere first, instead? I’m not expert at this at all, I just smell something wrong.
I’d say there’s a difference between “should work around the world” and “we’ll start with a global launch.”
There are a lot of decisions that you’d have to make when designing (and I use that in the classical “thinking up” sense, as well as the more technical sense of architecting the application) an application of any kind, and some of those decisions are strongly dependent on your target audience, and where they live.
The simplest example that pops to mind, for me anyway, is addresses. I don’t know whether this is relevant for you or not, but imagine you needed to represent someone’s location on their social profile. If you were designing with the United States as an end-goal, you’d probably be fine asking users to enter their zip code. That might even seem totally fine as a default choice. But if you then scale out and start looking at any other country, you’ll likely find that their format for postal codes is very different. By keeping your target of “anywhere and everywhere” in mind from the get-go, you’ll be more able to make good choices early-on about that sort of thing.
Another good example is the notoriously difficult problem of localization. A lot of startups might start off with code that’s pretty heavily dependent on the user’s language being English, then add localization as an after-thought. By knowing you’re targeting lots of people, you’ll probably make that investment earlier rather than later, and save some time down the road.
So, to answer your question, yes, you should be targeting only a small area first (particularly for a social network, I’d much rather have a thousand users in a single city, than a thousand users dispersed randomly across a thousand cities), but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth knowing what your eventual plan is.
I can’t really tell you which of these your stakeholder might have meant, of course, but I wouldn’t be so quick to write it off.
I guess I posted this without really mentioning another key point: some people–ahem–just don’t understand some things like this. Some people believe, erroneously I think, that launching to a huge target all at once is a good approach. There’s definitely merit to that, don’t get me wrong, but I think generally, it’s best to start small and grow as quickly as your user-base allows you to. That gives you a solid period to work out any bugs that make it that far, and it lets you test the waters more seriously than watering down your audience by geographically dispersing them.
So I wouldn’t be too surprised if your stakeholders felt that was the best approach, but in a lot of cases, I would disagree. That said, to be perfectly clear with my point here, it is very good to know that plan ahead of time.
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