Creating Digital Assets: Known buyers

👉 This is part of the Creating Digital Assets series.

A very useful thing to have when building a digital asset is a known buyer.

Digital asset: A productised service you deliver to a specific type of buyer.

Known buyer: Someone you’ve delivered that service to before.

The point of building a digital asset, to my view, is to take a service you’ve delivered a million times (give or take) and put a label on it.

By that definition, you’ll have at least one known buyer.

You could just take what you know and go find more people like them. That could work, but people with similar job titles don’t necessarily have similar todo lists.

Another way: you could speak to that buyer, ask them what they were trying to tick off their todo list when they asked you to do that service – their Job to be Done – then find out if more people have that same need.

According to the Jobs To Be Done framework, people buy products and services to get a specific job done:

1. Accomplish tasks
2. Achieve goals or objectives
3. Resolve and avoid problems
4. Make progress in their lives

When you know what the job is, you can understand which parts of your service will help solve it.

For example, BrandPocket’s initial customers needed to not rely on a PDF brand guidelines document anymore. It was almost useless to them.

The job it needed to do was make their brand assets easily sharable with their suppliers (they were asked weekly for one file or another), and those files needed to live somewhere where people on their team couldn’t mess with them – they had to be “locked” so to speak.

Again, the 3 big hairy competitors I mentioned yesterday all do this.

So some of the differences these customers requested (through interviews) were stripping away the bulk of features; doubling-down on a handful of more useful features; and “greening-up” the whole tool so they could start hammering down on their climate goals (that last point is where I need to be careful not to make another bullsh*t “carbon neutral” product and just facilitate more greenwash).

This all came from having a known buyer.

Of course, you can build a product from scratch by talking to people you like, and uncovering a job to be done that you can solve.

I just think if you’ve already solved something, why not take the shortcut?

I’m currently exploring all the components that make up the DNA of a sellable digital asset- so far I’ve identified at least 9.

Tomorrow: A very clear benefit, difference… or ideally both.

(Again – if you disagree with anything here, or have more to add, please let me know).