27 Part Journey to Starting a Side Hustle — Day Eight
Today is an interesting topic. The book encourages you to write about your idea customer. It wants you to think about just a single person. The person that will benefit the most from my service. I need to provide a lot of details about what that person is like and why that person wants to purchase my service. So, never really gave this much thought but let’s jump into it and have a little fun
I honestly think I have three ideal users of my service. Similar to Khan Academy, I want to have students, teachers, or parents access my services. It may be a little ambitious at first, and I might just pick one to get started, but I want the three different users to have a tailorized experience when accessing my service. What that means is that even though the content is basically all the same, the perspective the content is presented at is tailored towards one of my three ideal customers. So, let’s start with the student as that’s most likely who is going to interact with the site the most.
Student
Ideal customer is a student between K — 12. This student is eager to learn and topics covered in class and how they are presented aren’t enough. Their teachers do an excellent job at presenting information and make learning fun and engaging. However, there is something missing still. They want to work on things that are little more interesting. They want to build something with their hands. They want to get dirty and get messy as Mrs. Frizzle would say. I think back of when I was a student and I would always want to know what was in those “science kit” bins. My teachers would never let us touch them. I would assume that today, students have a lot more access to technology and STEM related items in the classroom. My observation however has been that teachers didn’t go to school to be engineers. I did and I think I can provide a different perspective to the student. My student may not know that they want to be engineers, but something inside of them tells them that they are curious. The content I create will be geared towards that student that is curious about how things work. My content will guide them, yet challenge them to think 4th dimensionally. I will create content that is straightforward but offers pivots that allow students to explore and innovate using the power of the internet and the plethora of resources available to them. Ultimately, every student will learn STEM topics but with a heavy emphasis on hands on building.
Parent
The idea parent will be one that wants the best for their child. They will look at my service and appreciate that the content isn’t readily available to their student via traditional education methods. The price will be just right that they can afford it since it will basically cost one cup of coffee a month. They will be presented with their children’s progress. The content will help their child get supplemental education that they don’t typically get in class rooms. I want my service to appeal to a larger demographic. I come from a low to low-middle class family. I’m the first generation of my family to go to college and also to actually complete it. Other races in America know that college is a no brainer. . . why wouldn’t their children go to college. But for me, growing up, I never thought about college. So, the parent that I’m targeting is one that most likely didn’t go to college but they want their children to have all the resources available to them so that they can make a change in their lives.
Teacher
Finally, the teacher will be my third ideal user. Teachers have an abundant of resources available to them. I’ve spoken to many over the years and I’ve basically have seen two camps. Teachers that innovative and they are then assigned to be the “head of STEAM” at their school. Then there are teachers that just need to get to retirement. I want to say I want to mainly target the first camp, but that would be silly. The content I develop, I want for to be so simple that anyone can feel comfortable using it. I want any class of teacher to come to my site and feel empowered to utilize my content and share with their students. I want to take out the fear of using technology and engineering in the classroom because they didn’t get trained in it.
Well those are my three customers and how I imagine I’ll be creating content for them. Ultimately, I think my service is a going to be a hybrid of ABCmouse, Khan Academy and freecodecamp. I haven’t hashed out all the details just yet, but as I brainstorm more on my service, the more excited I get. The difficult part right now is focusing on a minimal viable product that I can ship. . .otherwise I’ll just be stuck thinking about this like I’ve done for the past 7 years. I’m going to start small, and gradually build on my services. But my objective is to provide 1 piece of content to each of my three ideal users on day one.
Thanks for reading!
