Practical tool: How to identify the audience of your business

If you decide to start a business, it is crucial to know to whom you’re going to sell your products or services (also known as the audience of your business). But if you are at the beginning of your entrepreneurial path, you may not know how to do it. Or, even worse, you may not know you have to do it.

Identifying the audience of your business is one of those steps that are really important to the foundation of your business. But there are businesses who got lucky, found a few regular customers who are constantly returning for more products or services and that’s it.

If that’s the case, there are two things you should consider:

• First, be grateful for the way you’re doing business because it seems to be working. If you don’t know who your audience is but you manage to have a successful business, it means you’re delivering value.
• Second, you’ll never know when something will happen and you won’t have those clients anymore in your portfolio. New competition may appear on the market, with new, better, and cheaper products or services. Knowing whom you’re selling your products or services to is going to be really helpful in a critical situation.

Is the lack of the audience of your business a reason for why businesses fail?

According to fortune.com, 42% of startups identified the “lack of a market need for their product” as the single biggest reason for their failure. This could also be translated as not being able to find the right consumer for your product or service.

After all, identifying the audience of your business is one thing, targeting the audience of your business is a different thing, and selling to the audience of your business is something else. All these three steps can be seen as a part of the lack of a market need for your product or service, right?

Therefore, identifying the audience is the first step and the most important one but it’s not the only thing you have to do. And here’s the tricky part that most businesses struggle to understand: if you would really believe in your product or service, you wouldn’t stop after you find there’s no need for it. Instead, you should analyze and adjust.

How many businesses fail?

The numbers are pretty high and it’s understandable. After all, not all your ideas are successful and it’s really important how you define success.

Considering that around 20% of startups fail in the first year, then if you have 5 business ideas and you create a startup around all of them, then one of them may be successful.

More than that, only 25% of the above-mentioned 20% of startups are going to last more than 15 years. But these numbers are just numbers and I wouldn’t be too strict about them.

We all know there’s a chance of failure in everything we do, therefore it’s absolutely normal for failure to happen. For a second, let’s look behind our failures and realize that the entrepreneurial spirit will always be there.

If you consider yourself an entrepreneur and you truly want to succeed as one, then you’re going to try again and again until you succeed. After all, being an entrepreneur is not about being rich, but about having the freedom to do what you want the way you want, while also helping others. Focus on that and you’ll be both rich and fulfilled.

This tool will help you

1. Understand how to define success and have clarity over what you’re chasing.
2. Learn the importance of deciding on one product or service when you’re starting out.
3. Create a profile of your potential customers/clients.
4. Understand the importance and feedback and how to use feedback to adjust your product or service.