I finally get why people love to talk about focusing

When I’m creating, whether it be painting, writing, sculpting, etc I experience powerful moments of clarity. You may have experienced this feeling as well. It’s your gut instinct. Sometimes it will be when I know I’ve mixed the correct color or when I feel the painting is “done.” I got that feeling when I decided on my “target market” for QUOKA.
What Is A Target Market?
tar·get mar·ket - noun - a particular group of consumers at which a product or service is aimed.
For now, the target market for QUOKA is founders. I’ve considered narrowing that down even more, which is huge for me! Originally I had no target market. I think a lot of entrepreneurs start out this way. For me, it was because I felt that EVERYONE needed QUOKA. I mean, come on, mental health is key to everyone!
I still believe that to be true.

You Have To Start Somewhere
Rome was not built in a day, and you climb a mountain one step at a time. By narrowing my market, I by no means am abandoning that belief. I am committing to a smaller group to start because I am only one person, and it’s not sustainable to try and reach everyone at once at this point in my journey.

Trying to do it all at once would lead me to burnout. It would be a mistake that would ultimately cause QUOKA to fail. If I was truly committed to helping all the people, I had to start with this “target market.”
That was what my instinct was telling me. It was the artistic clarity moment that I had experienced so many times.
How I Found My Target Market
It all started with asking myself one question: who are the people that will buy from you? This was the prompt for week 5 of the Navigate Bootcamp. I’m sharing highlights from the process we went through with their permission. Hopefully, it will be helpful to someone! I know it was for me.
Initially, I outlined four groups to answer the above question.
Veterans
Single parents
Energy Workers
Founders
Just for clarification, “energy workers” included a bunch of people. Doctors, police officers, coaches, therapists, teachers, first responders, really anyone who worked or supported other people physically or mentally.
This type of work is energy-intensive, and mixes varying high-impact frequencies, rapidly.
I did not choose the four groups above because I had proof that they would buy. I hoped that they would and figured I would have to test each of them. I chose them because:
I know that some people in these groups struggle with mental health because of experiences people I know in those groups have shared with me
I have a hypothesis that these groups, once properly supported with their mental health, will have a large positive reverberation on our community as a whole.

Breaking Down The Customer Personas
The four groups were my “potential personas”. They all needed to be broken down. I assigned one to each member of the team and did the exercise myself, so we could compare notes.
Navigate provided prompt questions to break down the customer personas:

They also provided examples of what to do and what not to do. As I started to break down each persona, I had a clarity moment.
I knew the founder story in detail. It flowed out of me what a day in the life of a founder looks like. I knew their pain points and what motivated them.

Here are some of my notes from my founder breakdown.

So that’s it! If you are working on something yourself, I highly suggest this exercise. The only negative was that since I had already started user research, I now had to somewhat start that process over again. 😅
Otherwise, finding my target market was extremely motivating. Building QUOKA at times, feels very overwhelming. Having this smaller group to work with has brought me focus and made the individual tasks a lot easier to work through.
Cheers to baby steps! Until next time,
M
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