Value Creation 101 - Make Something People Want

It's been ages since businesses and making money have been linked to value. But it's sometimes difficult to see if any of our ideas are valuable enough for someone to be willing to hand their money to us in exchange. It's crazy! When you start thinking about it, you might lose your mind especially when the things you would want to turn into business ventures are merely hobbies and nothing more.

Value Creation 101 - Make Something People Want.png
Source
You will be blinded by the fact that since it matters to you, it will matter to the next person. Once you start down this road, you will soon realize that no one actually cares about your product or services as you thought they would.

Everyone is selfishly living their own lives and they only buy products for reasons best known to them. It will be up to you to figure out which part of their selfishness you will be able to satisfy with your product and service. This is where you must understand the core principles of customer psychology.

You need to sit still and learn why people buy products, by answering why anyone would even buy yours in the first place and not that of your competitors. At this point, it's up to you to discover what people want and meet their needs. This is because it will be a waste of time, energy, and resources to create something that no one wants. Your business will close down, right before it even started, after all, if no one is buying and you are not getting enough revenue where will you get the money to stay afloat?

No, don't tell me investors will do right by you because those breeds of human want to invest in something that generates returns and you can never blame them. The rate at which money is losing value it's only right for them to be interested in businesses that move the most needles.

Knowing this, it's worthy of note that people buy things to satisfy a few selfish desires like;

• Gaining Status

• Power

• Influence

• Bonding

• Satisfying Curiosity

• Protecting themselves

• Pleasure, etc.

All of these needs are fundamental human needs and every person at one stage or the other in their lives also needs a product or service to satisfy them.

And you must know that there are three layers to these things;

• Existence

• Relatedness

• Growth

All human needs can be categorized into these three layers. When a typical person has enough to survive, Josh Kaufman, in his book, The Personal MBA, says, the next thing on their agenda will be to make friends and find mates. And once they have a somewhat good relationship going, they will be able to do things they enjoy and to improve their skills.

So different companies fine-tune their products to meet some or all of these needs and of course, find a market for them. By doing so, their offer becomes more attractive than that of the next person and they certainly stay in business for as long as those needs continue to satisfy their clients.

The progress of your business will be dependent on the size and quality of the market you finally decide to serve. When you create a product that satisfies any of the human needs, the number of willing customers will determine the progress of your business.

This is where you need to find the group of people whose needs are unmet in one of those areas and create a market for them. Building a product first before doing market research is a recipe for failure because you can never force the group of people you are targeting to buy it if it's not what they need at the moment.

I guess this is why existing businesses pay a lot of money for people's data and information. With that amount of power in their hands, they can tailor their products and adverts to those places where their prospective clients are available and will be readily available to spend.

The internet has made it a bit easy to get your hands on a good customer base. All you have to do is learn how to reach them, how to show them your product is more valuable than that of the next person, and what to say to them to make them press the buy button.