If you have an idea for an e-commerce business and you’re ready to start creating your brand new shop design, then you should stop. Don’t do that! There’s a lot of work that has to be done before building a shop. If you’ll ignore that you’ll be relying on your luck and there’s a considerable risk that your venture will fail. Of course, as an entrepreneur, you always live with that risk, but it’s exceptionally high in the very beginning.

When starting a business, we focus mostly on ourselves and our perception. It’s tough to get out of that box and focus on your customers instead because it usually leads to unpleasant thoughts and conclusions. It is essential to embrace uncomfortable questions and answer them as early as possible. It will allow you to fail soon and adjust your plans and goals to the reality.

I’ve seen countless projects where business owners were focused on themselves without researching outside world. It usually leads to a store launch following an ad campaign for a relatively vague audience. Or that campaign reveals that prospective customers are not ready to pay for the type of products the business is selling.

You need an audience.

Before launching anything, you need to do a lot of research. Fundamental questions should be who you are going to sell to, what they care about and how you are going to reach them. Let’s say you want to start T-shirt printing business and you have some lovely designs ready. Are those designs tailored for specific people or they’re generic? Have you had in mind someone specific?

For the sake of example, I’d assume you’re going to sell t-shirts to developers. Are you sure that those developers buy T-shirts? What kind of T-shirts do they buy? What are their beliefs? Best way to figure out is to find places online where your target audience gathers.

For developers, it would be a forum, /r/programming subreddit, a Slack group or even a mailing list. To find those, you need to be quite specific because not all developers are the same. When you start to research and analyze your target audience, you quickly realize that there are certain sub-audiences that you should be aware of — in our example that would be web developers or mobile developers. You can go further and slice and dice them by programming language (Javascript, C#), by platform (iOS, Android) other ways.

Just don’t get too specific. If you’ll focus on an audience that consists of 100 people you won’t be able to make a living. You need to choose a group of people that is both large enough to sell to and grow a business and crisp enough to identify as a group and gather online.

What makes a good audience

There are two fundamental questions you need to ask yourself about your audience. Answering each one of them will require you to do research and try different approaches.

1. Can you reach them? If you’re going to sell your shirts to lumberjacks than you might find out that they don’t hang out online. That means there’s no website, subreddit or facebook group that they use to talk to each other. If there’s no place where they gather then how you are going to advertise your products? It’s an important question you need to ask yourself early on. Of course, you can always rely on SEO and PPC, but both of them are usually much more expensive than social media ads if your targeting is vague or if your keywords are highly competitive. Moreover, you can use your audience’s social media groups to interact with them and ask for feedback. For example, you can show them your designs and ask if they like them. Just be yourself and don’t try to sell anything right away

2. What do they care about? You’d be surprised, but it is highly unlikely that your audience cares about your product. Unless you are selling flying hoverboards that everybody is waiting for since Back To The Future II came out in 1989. But if you are like me, you’re probably not selling something people are thinking about. If you go to any forum where developers hang out, you will quickly find out that they don’t care about their look and style. They care about bugs, recent industry news, their salary, health, and relationships. It’s important to understand that products you are going to sell are means to achieve other goals, and you must know what they are. Maybe they’re going to buy those tees to impress the girl they like, or perhaps to be more popular at work to receive a raise.

Focus on them

As an entrepreneur, it’s tough to shift focus from yourself to your customer. Accepting that people you want to sell don’t care about you do is very painful. But it is necessary to properly market your brand.

Most of the businesses talk only about themselves. Look at our shop; we have new stock, look at this product, it has so many nice features — they say. But customers care only about themselves. That does not convince them. You need to reframe the conversation. Tell them why they should take a look at that shiny new product, tell them how it’s going to make their lives better and make their dreams come true. But you need to know your customer to be able to do that. You need to wear their shoes.

Marketing to an audience

When you know your audience, it’s easier to market your products and brand. Instead of trying to find where to display your ads after shop launch you can and should start working with your audience way before launch. It is called customer development, and it requires zero financial investment but takes time. It’s not easy and not fun, maybe that’s why a lot of businesses skip this step entirely. You can start marketing to your audience right now but going to their online communities and participating. You can start talking with them and helping them with things they care about. It will make you understand your customer and become part of the target audience.

I would highly suggest you start a blog before launching a product and building a mailing list around the blog. Advertising useful content is much easier than advertising products. People are more likely to click ads with content they feel is relevant, and they will signup to the newsletter if you are continually posting something they like. And building a mailing list is one of the crucial parts of e-commerce.