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Good luck! In the spirit of your post, here are four reasons that I think the opportunity you are currently pursuing will fail.

First, you are not making something that people want. The primary customer you have to satisfy here are fashion bloggers (as once you get them, you will get access to end consumers). However, I would speculate that the ability to easily create "outfits" is not the #1 pain for fashion bloggers. In general, customers want to solve their #1 pain. If you solve a problem that is NOT your customers' #1 pain, you will find it very hard to get the attention of those customers.

To address this issue, I would call fashion bloggers and ask them what their problems are. I would speculate that "easily making outfits" is not their #1 problem.

Second, fashion bloggers aren't a very profitable customer to pursue, so a business that targets that market will find it hard to make money. By contrast, if you targeted an industry that makes money, your customers would have more revenue to share with you. On a related note, many fashion bloggers are not making enough to make a full-time living, so they don't think of their fashion blogs as a business. Thus, even if you create a product that makes them money, they may still not adopt your product.

To address this issue, I would find a more profitable customer to pursue that makes at least $50,000 a year. Also, I would make sure that those customers consider what they do to be their main source of income. This would exclude hobbyists.

Third, I would be concerned that it's hard to reach fashion bloggers to market your product to them. Yes, you can pitch them by email or Twitter. However, fashion bloggers are innudated with pitches, and often ignore them.

To address this issue, I would target a market that wants to be reached, so you can easily reach them to pitch your product.

Fourth, fashion bloggers aren't used to paying for software. Thus, you would have a harder time convincing them to pay you for your software. Compare this to, say, a salesperson, who is used to paying for a CRM and all sorts of software.

To address this issue, you would have to find a way to make money without directly charging your user (the fashion blogger). One way to do this is to require your product be linked with your third-party affiliate codes, and then do a revenue-share on those affiliate earnings. However, this would be hard for fashion bloggers to accept, and would require policing on your part.

In conclusion, I would urge you to switch your focus to (1) solving the #1 pain for (2) a lucrative market that (3) you can reach easily and (4) that is used to buying software.

Good luck!



One one hand you say fashion bloggers are a small market because there are not a lot of them, and on the other hand you say you have to cater them to get to a bigger market; this does not compute.

To the original poster: I don't think you have to market to fashion bloggers at all. It helps if they see value in what you do and they promote it, but they are not your final customer: pay attention to your end customer's needs instead.




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