Give the people what they want

We've had a couple of really interesting days at DrDoctor. Aware that we don't want to build something that no one wants, we've been in outpatients departments, talking to patients and understanding their frustrations. Asking them what they want.

Quickly it becomes clear that people know what they want - "ease and convenience" - again and again that phrase came up. However, they don't know necessarily how to achieve that. Most people, when asked for their 'ideal solution' come up with a variant of what already exists and can be suspicious of new technology. Those same people, when given a demo of something new to play with quickly begin to get excited about how good it would be.

I think this comes back to a common tech story - people don't know what they want. Much like apple avoiding focus groups; if you asked a pre iPhone user group what they wanted from their next phone they would say 'more buttons'. As an entrepreneur we need to make that jump for people and lead them to the possible.

Which brings us to distribution. As the Dropbox team initially found, you can build a killer service, but if its genuinely different, genuinely disruptive, people won't be searching for it; because they haven't thought of it. So we need to find different ways to get the word out there. For Dropbox this was a simple, funny video, which explained the product and appealed to a certain audience. For us its more traditional approaches; having Doctors recommend the product, posters in hospitals and mainstream press. Always focusing on being the easiest route to healthcare.

Think about who your users might be and find an angle which appeals enough that people will pass it on. A good start is to build something different; then focus on a fundamental human emotion or trait - ease, convenience, money saving, sex - and work from there.