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Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

To add, approximately one half of people in the real world share a common demographic category with a sliver of HN users and a fraction of a sliver of what we create.

Women have money. Go take it. Nobody else wants it in tech. (Well, aside from Groupon, Zynga, and a few other companies that missed the opportunity to make an iPhone app that you could wiggle to share photos.)

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> Women have money. Go take it.

What do they want?!? I could never figure that one out.

It's about what humans want. Humans act the same, for the most part, accounting for cultural differences. (Fashion is an example of a cultural difference, In Turkey, for example, men often place as much importance on being stylish as American women do.)

So, think culture development. Talk To Customers. (And don't try to flirt. Look at their faces. Write notes.) Talk to them both individually and in groups.

Have a partner actually in the demographic.

This is common advice, but I find it frustratingly vague. Talk to people? I talk to people all the time. Heck, I talk to women all the time — half my friends are women, I currently live with two female housemates and used to live with a third, and my mother is a middle-aged office manager. After years of talking to them, I can only conclude that I've missed the boat on making Facebook, Etsy, The Sims and Model Mayhem.

I imagine a lot of people are in the same boat. It's hard to talk to people in a way that reveals product opportunities. That's why they make things for the only people who will actually tell them what they want — themselves.

You may find this a helpful starting point:

http://www.dlt.ri.gov/lmi/census/wf/female.htm

Shoes.

I know what you mean. When I've suggested targeting a female demographic with things that are somewhat silly, but most women just go crazy over (seen by how many women get into similar thing in several businesses) I was dismissed out of hand.

As far as commerce, Etsy has done very well in the female demographic. Their membership is heavily female.

The Palm Pre used this strategy. Not that it's necessarily bad, but I don't think it's necessarily an instant cash-in either. You have to do things correctly and carefully, and I think the difference between appealing primarily to women and appealing to men is fundamentally a stylistic one.

I don't know how the hell they did it, but it worked for Palm. I was watching 'born rich' recently and one of the celebutantes says, referring to a handbag, 'it has room for my palm pilot, or paper, if you are still into that'.

They do not only have money. They have a strong influence (and almost always the last word) in most of end-consumer buying decisions.

It's strange so little companies focus on them

People are taught to focus on a market they understand, specifically themselves if nothing else. Women, on the other hand, are hard to understand, even to other women.

really?

http://www.neosprockets.com/index.php/2010/01/chick-flick-ge...

If that worked, then movie studios would just churn out chick movies with guaranteed profits aplenty.

(actually this does seem to work in the Harlequin romance corner of publishing - if you can apply this to a startup, more power to you)

They pretty much do, it's just that women aren't the only target demographic that you can do this with. Think comic book movies, etc. They're all aiming at a very specific subset of the population and tailoring films to that group.

http://www.cracked.com/article_19012_5-hollywood-secrets-tha...

They do, it's just not what you'd expect. For example, here in the UK, Volvo are big sponsors of the Twilight franchise. How does that make any sort of sense!? Well of course it does, because Twilight's core readers aren't teenagers at all, they're 30-something women. Same demographic that're buying all the Kindles.

Any ad you see that you don't understand, any product you think is irrelevant, someone must be buying it or it wouldn't exist. So, pause for a second and think, this is not for me, who is it for?

  > someone must be buying it or it wouldn't exist

That's assuming that no product is ever a failure.

Very few products are not bought by anyone, ever!

You may not be aware but there are a lot of other websites taking money from women. IE. shoe website innovations. I recall there was also some fashion site at TC Disrupt that reminded me of Swoopo. I wonder what happened to it.

Women are interested in much more than fashion and shoes (and there are many men who are interested in fashion and shoes). The market seems pretty poorly understood by tech innovators.

"Women are interested in much more than fashion and shoes" - source please.

http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=793

Also, your joke is not funny.

I've got a web app that's used by mostly women, but for some reason I'm not swimming in cash. But I wish it was true!

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