How do I choose which customer to go after?
Hi folks, here's the gist:
I run a small domain search engine that helps customers to find unique and available domain names, without having to do a lot of thinking or planning. It started as a fun side project, but people loved it, so I've turned it into a legitimate business. Not a unicorn or anything, but it makes some money, which is nice.
Lately, I've been a bit stuck when deciding what to work on next, since I've got two types of customers , and they are almost polar opposite. I've got to pick just one of them.
On one hand, I have domain investors. There are people who buy hundreds and thousands of domains with the hope to resell them later. They buy a lot, and once they start using the tools they stick around. They also tell each other about the best tools they use. This is all great for sharing and stickiness, but there aren't that many of these investors, and they are notoriously cheap. More importantly, while I am learning from them, I am not planning to become one. I just don't get excited about the idea of holding on to thousands of domains.
One the other hand, there's a drive-by consumer. This is someone who just needs a cool name for their next project or a company. I am one of them and there are a lot of them. I can make some fun tools for this audience that I can see using myself. It feels better to work on the consumer side. The problem is, these buyers only need this service once in a while. The cost to acquire them is high, and there is no stickiness. Correction, I could get to where I offer sticky solutions (like websites or dns), but it's a very non-trivial problem and will take a lot of time and work. I am not sure I am up for sinking in months of effort just to test an idea of what might work for the consumer, especially in a rather competitive market (weebly, wix, squarespace, webflow...etc).
As such, I am still stuck. I want to work on the consumer side, but I am not sure how much effort it will take until I am making money from them. I could work on the domainer side, but it feels mind-numbing to even think about it.
How would you make a choice, and/or what else should I consider? Thank you!
@csallen since you guys were asking for new layout feedback on Twitter, here's something--
I might just be asking a dumb question here and therefore not getting any comments on it, but in the old interface it was at least clearly see where this post got posted. I think in the recently-old interface I was able to post them to a particular group/topic.
Now that I wrote this, it just disappeared into nowhere after I hit publish. Only way to find it was to look at my post history. It's entirely unclear where it goes, or where other's posts like this would appear.
The old interface wasn't as pretty, but it felt more functional. There's probably a good middle ground.
Good point, I think it would make sense to do a better job redirecting to where your post appears after you submit it 🤔