Digital Product Designer

The most valuable skill in a digital product designer's toolbox is LISTENING.

Just by immersing ourselves into a particular community, you expose yourself to a limitless source of complaints, frustrations, problems and headaches. Over time you will notice recurring patterns and face repeating fundamental issues that people simply can't seem to solve.

Each of those unsolved frustrations is a product design opportunity.

The Frustration Solved by Koalabear

Imagine you've been spending tons of time in the business coaching community. These are small business owners who either work by themselves or with a small team. They're not particularly computer savvy and simply want to deliver a course or education product to their customer.

You've noticed a repeating pattern.

People keep asking for help in connecting the numerous pieces of software that they use to run their business. Scheduling, course hosting platforms, emails, payment portals, CRM, billing, accounting, project management. There's a dozen different software suites that they need to use daily, and none of them speak the same language.

If only there was a simple website that would host all of this under one roof.

Bingo. That's where we strike with Koalabear.

We've noticed a possible problem with a possible solution now. Would people be interested?

Let's test it out. It's time for market research. This is the most crucially important phase of the whole product design cycle, and can be the deciding factor between a 7-figure and crickets at launch. It can be repetitive, frustrating and tedious, but it's absolutely necessary.

Pat Flynn (smartpassiveincome.com) spent $40000 creating a software product that nobody bought, because he didn't pay attention in this phase of product building.

First, do a thorough competitor analysis. This is mostly a mechanical process of collecting information, but nonetheless crucially important. What features do your competitors offer? Their price points and usp? Can you find a good amount of competition in the first place, or in other words, does your market really exist?

Then comes user data. What do your users actually want. There's many ways to gather this sort of soft data - surveys, Facebook polls, content marketing campaigns etc, but I still find the best data comes straight from possible buyers.

So during your time in these communities, engage with people asking for help. Get them on the phone for a quick interview.

Ask questions like:

Your aim during these interviews is not only to find out what people want. Your aim is to shake people's reality. Give them something that they never thought was possible.

Disrupting the industry is a cliché, but if you're able to blow your customer's mind, you might have a great product on your hands.

When you start engaging, start growing your mailing list. This will be the core group of people who will test your product and serve as the launchpad for a larger audience at the final product launch stage.

Now you have a handful of people on your mailing list and you're starting to get a holistic view of what people would expect to see in your particular product.

Now we sell your product.

Yes, we sell before you've done anything. Why? Because this is the only way to find out if people will actually swipe their credit cards to get your product.

Danny Iny (Mirasee Marketing) only creates products he has sold out first. This way it guarantees success, or at the very least minimizes his losses. You must do the same.

The next stage of product design is to write a sales page. If you're not into the copywriting game, try to keep it a simple three part sales page.

Here's how:

There's tons of ways to improve on this sales page later, but a simple page will suffice for now.

Send your audience to this page and ask what they think. Tell them to purchase immediately to join the beta-crowd and ultimately get the final product for a heavy discount.

We need people to make a purchase on their own accord. This is key. Only people buying will give you data about people buying.

A group of people have paid you for a product that doesn't exist. It's time to deliver!

There are some considerations here.

First, you've received suggestions, ideas for improvement and critique of your upcoming product. Be aware that most feedback can not be taken at face value. Most users don't know what they want, and most things they want are not what they need from your product. Be very clear of what problem your product solves and approach any possible improvements only from that perspective. Be ready to ignore an amazing idea if it simply does not fit your product.

While you essentially have the blueprint of a product to create, it's best to start with the minimum viable product (MVP)-approach. In other words, launch rapidly and minimize the iteration time.

For example, if you're creating an educational course program, it might be best to create a very minimal skeleton framework and execute the course as a live video series. This way you can course correct along the way, while getting priceless feedback in real time.

If you're creating a software product, create the minimal functional prototype and publish it. Optimization and polishing can come later. You need to get the core functionality available to your test audience ASAP.

Now it's time to finish your product and start planning a major launch event for the larger audience.

People have had a chance to test, get frustrated, break, and love your product now. This means they know its bugs and foibles probably better than you do. You've also noticed common threads in support requests and whatever discussion forum you have related to your product.

It's time to revise and finalize. Gather whatever information you have available, get people on the phone, survey your users. Do everything you can to get an accurate idea of what your user's experience is using your product.

Still keeping in mind the minimum viable product-mentality, finish it. Add all promised features, fix bugs, clean up the user interface.

But only aim for 80-90% perfect. Remember that this is only version 1 of your product. Future revisions will help you improve.

Right now the most important goal is to get it launched.

Congrats, now for the tough part. Launch, marketing, post-marketing etc.

There's so many ways to launch a product, and they're all so case-dependent that diving deeper into this section will be somewhat beyond the scope of this page which is more about designing products.

Suffice to say, a good product launch involves webinars, product tutorials, free content, getting interviews with influencers, paid ad campaigns, giveaways etc. You might even consider doing a joint venture with another provider to leverage each others' offers.

As a marketer who's been part of numerous successful product launches, I'm available for consultation on product launch strategy, but my main skillset is designing products to solve your business problems.

So hit the button below to get in touch. Let's get this show on the road!