Are any of you fellow app developers performing customer research before bringing your app to the market? If so, are you using focus groups, friends' reviews, online surveys, or other methods? I feel it's quite difficult to determine who my real customers are and whether they would like and pay for my app. And it's not like competitor apps openly display information on who they target, so it's hard to make a comparison. How are you dealing with that? Thank you for your suggestions!!

I think figuring out your target market is a crucial aspect to bringing an app to market. It's something that can help you focus your marketing/development efforts and will save you tons of time/money that you'd spend trying to appeal to everyone. Once you understand who you want to reach, it's easy to find them. Just figure out where they'd most likely be, online or off and you can make certain efforts to find them there to talk/interview them. For example, a sporting app developer might go to games, practices, sports bars for offline interactions or forums at sites like espn.com for online interactions. If the app is something that could appeal to anyone and makes it difficult to choose one target market, maybe you should write down a few consumer segments and try to reach them at different times with different methods, taking care to note which segments were most excited/likely to purchase, which are biggest, fastest growing, and etc.

Thank you for your input. I guess I do have one of those apps that could be cool for anyone, even adults AND kids! But I may be able to find the places they 'hangout'... Do you know anything about online focus groups? And would you ever undertake an online survey to determine the need for your product? Thanks again!

I believe Wendy's followed the opposition research model, "Put a Wendy's next to every McDonald's". Or was that Burger King?

A few years ago Niche Marketing was the hot topic. There is unlimited amounts of info on the net on techniques to find target audiences, eager buyers, return visitors and all the rest. Now those techniques apply to apps. Pretty simple really. Don't build an app then find the target market, find the target market then build an app.

Online surveys and focus groups can be helpful but relying on them solely or placing too much weight on their findings would be ill-advised. Traction and feedback from actual users is the most important aspect!

I usually build for what I like personally, and hopefully, one of the ones will hit a good market. If I build for the market specifically, it's no fun building, my best doesn't come out :) Cheers, David buzztouchmods.com