Why you should attract "the Normals" | Hacker News Reader

Why you should attract "the Normals"

spencerfry.com

45 pointsinmygarage26 comments

Rather little How in the How To here. That's unfortunate.

Here's my top five:

1) SEO and AdSense. Learn 'em. Really, this could be points one through five.

2) Focus your marketing attention on the pain point your software/service addresses and how their lives will improve as a result of using it (benefits), not on what your software/service does (features).

3) Instrument freaking everything and remove anything which causes more people to fail at whatever the core task of your application is. If you do this, you will find places where your view of the world is so different from your users' that you could not possibly predict what their issue would be. e.g. for the significant percentage of your users who think Google is the Internet.

4) Email is the single best way to maintain your relationship with someone when they're not on your site, which is most of the time.

5) About 1 million people Tweet. Some 3 millionish people subscribe to Techcrunch. Twenty million voted for Ross Perot. Please recalibrate your understanding of what broad mainstream appeal is.

My article is in no way focused on "how to" attract normals. This is simply an opinion piece on why you should focus on Normals rather than techies and early adopters. I just saw this post on Hacker News and I did not select the title. :)

D'oh, you're right. I didn't even see your H1 tag -- my brain mentally skips them on the assumption they match the HN title, as is the case 99.99% of the time.

In addition to your rationales, which I largely agree with, I'm sort of partial to "People who are normal pay money for things, even things not made by Apple, even in prices above $1.99."

Totally agree with that. Normal folks are happy to drop $10-25 or more a month for products that they like, enjoy, need, etc. While a lot of my entrepreneur friends are pretty stingy when buying products and things online unless they really need them. It's quite comical, because most of us sell products online. :)

This is a fascinating statement, and I have found it to be very true in the sample space I have seen. My hypothesis is that a large number of entrepreneurs tend to be highly analytical, and therefore focus on value and utility. Most people though tend to spend money due to an emotional response, and therefore are happy to make the purchase.

I agree with the point that aarghh made. I also believe it stems from the idea that "that site isn't that complicated; I could do that myself--why would I pay someone $X per month for something I could do myself?" Unfortunately, if you're a software developer, that covers most everything on the Internet.

I changed the title to "why you should" though I do think there's a lot of "how to" in the article - just not in the typical list form that makes how to articles digestible.

Just to clarify, did you mean AdWords where you said AdSense?

Most groups would designate anyone outside as Others. In this case, because hackers seem to enjoy thinking of themselves as the outsiders, we're calling anyone else Normals. All well and good for us, but within the Normals there are incredible numbers of groups with their own preferences. To target the Normal is to disregard that it only exists from your perspective.

I came here to say something similar.

I think all this labelling as "normal" / "other" is unhealthy, because it leads to unexamined associations about the group, and thoughts like "the 'normal' people are morally better, anyone with different preferences is wrong and evil" or the way some people treat the "normal" as the only kind of people that exist, and try to deny the existence of any group that has a different preference.

There are certainly different groups with different preferences and abilities, but I think it's important to avoid value-laden terms when thinking about them. (except possibly "value" in the strictly commercial sense").

I think you're missing my point. Find a large group of less Internet savvy folks to target and build a product for them. Pulled from my article:

1. Normals stick around a lot longer and are far more loyal than early adopters.

2. Normals are friends with other Normals, which propagates the cycle.

3. The Normals group is a larger market than the early adopters and techies group.

4. Normals appreciate simple, so it's easier and less time consuming to build a product for them.

Further reading on Chris Dixon's blog:

http://cdixon.org/2010/01/22/techies-and-normals/

I agree with you in that it could be a good market segment to go for, but I think there's a lot of potential value in other market segments.

For example, the ISP I use targets technical users, and they seem to be doing quite nicely.

Oh. There's certainly room for building products/services for technical users. A lot of people do that well and make a lot of money doing just that. It's just a lot more difficult to penetrate the market and there's less room for massive scale. Your users are inherently more tech savvy, will voice their opinion far more often, and be a lot more critical of your service.

True, true, I was just reacting to the "this is the only market segment anyone is ever allowed to go for" tone.

It's not a one bit encoding of "Hacker vs. Normal" and early adopters are different from technologists. See for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossing_the_chasm

Technologists enjoy new things even if they don't work, early adopters are trying to solve a problem but don't mind going first as long as it works. Pragmatics (early majority) want to solve a problem using tools that other pragmatics are also using because they want the comforts of a whole product. Conservatives (late majority) are very cost conscious and want it dead simple. Laggards make do with pre-existing solutions until they are no longer available at a reasonable price.

By the way, it's extremely difficult to build simple products that work reliably. They always come later. It's much easier to build an innovative productive that is partially reliable but provides functionality or performance that is not available.

I like to use "neurotypicals" when referring to "normals". Slightly more condescending, but not quite as hair-ruffling as "troglodytes".

Plus, the /euro/ syllables can be stressed for extra condescension points!

The fact of the matter is the phase, "normals" used in the article is just a way of referring to a large group of average consumers in a succinct way.

Pickup 'Crossing the Chasm' by Geoffrey Moore.

You have to initially market to early adopters and then assuming that's successful you make the jump to the 'normals' by graduating your marketing strategy.

It's a simple concept that many companies fail to implement.

Nice work Spencer, great blog post as normal. I think you're right on with the idea of marketing to "normals," or the "target market," whichever term you feel more comfortable with. It's a really tough transition and one that normally comes with compromises and alterations to the service/product. We're just starting our journey across that chasm, and it's not easy. Your team's design skills are far better than ours and it's a struggle to make everything intuitive enough for most folks to say nothing of the product focus!

I had to chuckle fjabre, "Cross the Chasm" is what I was thinking as well as I read this one. This is also referenced in Godin's "The Dip" (just to make sure I cover all my buzz-worthy maven authors).

I dunno, I'd hardly call CarbonMade's users "Normals": Concept artists? Fashion Stylist? Photographers?

Instead, I'd call that a good old-fashioned "target market." They don't seem to be targeting the 99% SpencerFry calls out as "normals" of the Internet, they're targeting maybe 2% of the Internet that doesn't happen to be early adopters, which is just another 2% of the Internet (good advice, IMHO).

I guess it just seems to be (well intended!) misleading to encourage people to attract this mass idea of a "normal" market when the market the company hits is just as niche, but a different niche.

The issues with getting the normals to use your apps, is that the generally won't search your product, neither listen or read about it because they don't read blogs, techcrunch, etc...

They end up using products when some friends tell them about it. You should focus on getting early adopters, without adding function that would fear normals. I think it makes sense. (I read that somewhere, but can't remember where - if someone had a link ? )

You can be the hottest startup on the block with 100,000 active early adopters, but I'd trade every one of those users for Normals in all cases.

If its a one-for-one trade, that's a bad deal.

Based on solely the graphics alone is their definiton of 'normals' consist solely of 12 year olds?

I am serious. I know plenty of otherwise intelligent, web challenged 'normals' who would be embarrased to be seen using this site. Least the ones over the age of fifteen;<).

http://carbonmade.com/examples

Some examples of what the actual portfolios look like.

"Another telltale sign is that instead of going directly to web pages, they use the search bar."

I've seen this as a 'test' for the unsophisticated user a couple of times, and I don't understand the reasoning behind it.

I do almost all of my web navigation via search-bar and auto-complete.

It works quite well (this particular Facebook page is weird though).

This is mostly because I don't like managing bookmarks (Bookmarks get too cluttery if you actually use them as bookmarks... I only use them for temporary stuff like saving pages for a product i'm researching).

If I really want to find something and I can't remember the name of the site (which is a rarity), I'd just use browser history or search for keywords anyway...

I think that there is something ergonomically wrong with the way that we name websites. http://news.ycombinator.com/ does not stick in my head (it does not come to mind first anyway). "Hacker News" totally does, and it is easier to type.

I think that implying people are unsophisticated when they are really just lazy/apathetic about specific technical details leads you to the wrong conclusions about what type of things they can handle.

I think you have a good point about the test not being perfect. But I think your explanation is a great example of what such basic tests are really trying to get at: people's usage habits reflect their level of knowledge. I agree that the reasons you bring up are valid, and to use the search bar for those reasons shows your grasp of the technology. There are pleny of people who use the search bar instead of the address bar because they just plain don't understand the address bar. Their reasons are the complete polar opposite of yours, but the end result is the same or very similar usage pattern. Unfortunately, like so much in life, it takes a lot more than a simple test to accurately determine the "why" behind an action instead of just measuring the "what."

Here is a long, only tangentially related story about the computer usage habits of "normals" where the action, a system restart, is much less an indicator of the problem than the reason...

I was getting together with a bunch of high school friends after our first year of college. We were chatting about our experiences, and as tended to happen around myself and my computer savy friend, discussion of computer problems started. One person began sharing a problem that they have with their laptop where for some reason the keyboard "gets messed up" and numbers start appearing instead of letters. I thought it was amusing, until I was shocked to hear not one but three more people jump in and share that they've had the same strange problem. These weren't dumb people either, just not tech savy folks. I was about to explain the concept of numlock to them, when one of the people pointed out that the problem could be fixed with a reboot, and advised the others to try it the next time they encountered the issue.

As I said, not stupid people. Most of them were at ivy league institutions and have gone on to successful careers. They don't know jack about computers. These are the "normals" we have to make sure not to forget when we design software.

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