We’re embarking on a small, private research project here at Draft – focused on independent software, of course. Here are the steps behind what we’re doing and what we hope to get from it.
1. Map the market
The short-term goal is to map our addressable market. Who will we offer to serve? In what specific ways are they in need of value-based design?
We’re figuring this out by going to a handful of watering holes & indices, and pulling down every independent business that makes more than $600k and less than $15M (more than that and they’d probably just hire us for a workshop).
2. Research their needs
Then, we will research their needs. What drives them? In what specific ways are they talking about their own work?
Here, we’ll be analyzing conference talks, forum posts, semi-private Slacks, and team members’ blog posts & newsletters to understand how they’re building and what we can do to help.
3. Assess their challenges
Finally, their specific issues. What, in aggregate, do they usually get wrong? What should they do instead?
The first two steps existed so we can have a clearer sense of our market and how to speak to them. This step exists for when people get in our door. We want to create a proprietary system for benchmarking our clients against the rest of the industry – so we can have a clearer sense of what to recommend and why.
This is fun and I’m excited about it
We didn’t really get a chance to do this with our previous positioning, for two reasons. First, there are already very good resources for understanding the specific ways in which design could help that market. And second, our work was mostly focused on spaceholding & leveraged power dynamics, not the actual practice of design.
Software is different. There are calm companies in software. People act rationally in software. And they still have challenges that we’re honored to help them with. We repositioned in order to return our design practice to its correct place. And we’re very excited to get started again.