8: How to Find Winning Products Your Customers Actually Want

Hello and welcome to the Product Growth Lab podcast with Sabrina George and Melissa Fegal. This is the podcast for creative product-based business owners who want to grow their businesses without overwhelm or massive investment. Each episode, we explore actionable strategies, real-life stories, and insights from business owners and experts who know what it takes to succeed. Whether you're just starting out or looking to scale, we're here to help you grow your business on your own terms. Subscribe and join us each week as we dive into practical advice and inspiring stories to fuel your growth journey. This is Product Growth Lab. Let's get started. Hello everyone. Today we are talking about how to find winning products that your customers actually want. And this is so important. I know, I think we both have launched products in the past where we haven't actually done any research and they flopped.

The whole, I like this, I wanna pick this, this is fun to do. Flop. No sales, bad sales, returns.

So that's why today we are going to look at the strategies we can use to identify and develop products that resonate with our customers.

No matter what, people, you cannot escape research. Be like the byline of this whole episode.

If you've ever launched a product that flopped or struggled to know what your customers really want, then this is the episode for you. So the first tip we have for you today is actually understanding your target audience. And I can hear everyone groaning already. We've talked, spoken about it before. It's really key to know your target audience. And then we kind of give the advice before about, you kind of, you pick someone, you make things for them, and then you kind of over time start to get to know who's actually buying them. So if you're starting out, just pick something, go with it, try it, and we'll see what happens. And if you are a little bit more advanced, then you can start to pull your audience a little bit and see what they like. But your products will succeed when they actually solve a problem that people have, fulfill some sort of desire they have. 'Cause obviously if you're creating something a bit more frivolous, you wanna call it pretty, I feel like pretty falls in that category. Yeah. Like it usually doesn't necessarily solve a problem apart from like your bare neck, but it fulfills a desire. You want to look good.

Emotional needs are just as valid as physical needs.

But solve a problem, but if I also serve desire or meet a need that someone has, that's when I succeed. You need to make sure that you keep them in mind as you create the product, and then you also need to speak to those people when you launch it. So your first question is probably, how do I get to actually know my customers? It's actually asking them. Anyway, you can get in front of people and ask them questions. The absolute best way to do this is actually sit down and talk to someone, but you're probably not gonna want to do that as much as I tell you, like, let's just—

pick up your phone and call and talk to your—

but if you have some sort of audience collected somewhere, you have a Facebook group or an email list, you can create surveys, you can do polls, and it doesn't have to be formal. Like, survey sounds really formal and a little bit boring. And without some sort of bribe, you're probably not going to get people to answer your survey. But thinking about like Facebook or Instagram, Facebook group polls, how many polls do you see on Facebook groups? Like, it's a pretty big feature. If you're on Instagram stories, there's all those different stickers and people answer them. If you ask, you can do like a poll, you can do, there's like a question box, there's all sorts of stuff, and they're really great ways to get Feedback.

If you're really nervous about running polls, like especially the Instagram ones, the best thing to just have two options. Give two like polar opposite or ridiculous options and you start to narrow in cuz people are always gonna choose. If there's one of two options, they're like, oh, this one. If you have like 8 options, it might be too much work to make a decision, so they leave.

It seems more fun, like with surveys, sounds really boring, but if I'm clicking through stories and it's like, oh yeah. Like it's interactive, something to do. People fill those out much more. And it's anonymous. So there's not like a, the same back, like sometimes we ask people to comment publicly, they don't admit it, they're reluctant, but when it's like, okay, no one else can see that I've commented on Melissa's question about something embarrassing. It's anonymous. So I'll just, I will fill this in. You can also, beyond just asking, you can also kind of look at what people have bought in the past. Look at your previous sales. Look up everything you sold before. What actually sells? It's like, okay, most of my products come in— well, mine, for real life, pretty much everything comes in red or blue. Some things have different ones, but most of it comes in red or blue. And I know if I kind of stick to those, my audience will like it. But if I decide next week I'm going to do this in green, that's just like the more Risky decision. You can personalize it in like, I don't know how many different colors, but it's a few. Because I have like all your base kind of red and yellow and pink and green and yellow and blue and blah blah. If I were to actually look down at my stats, I think there's some of them that have never been chosen. I don't know if I've ever used yellow on any objects ever. Is it? I always feel fitted weird to take off. If I was actually willing to do it, I could actually look back all orders I've gotten over the years and look and go, okay, how often do any of these things get used? The axle, because it's so visual, I can see the threads in front of me, I can tell which ones get used and which ones don't. I think there's like blue, light blue, dark blue, navy. I probably could take that off, but I don't want to edit every single list I have, so let's not. Do that this week. No, but as I launch a new product, maybe I don't add it in.

This is by like what they've bought before. That's the easy one. If you don't have sales or you don't have a lot of sales, then the surveys, the polls, this or that question, especially if you do it like image style, those are all fantastic ways to know about your audience. You still don't know if those things are, they're not 100% guaranteed to sell. But at least it's more data than nothing.

So look at— and you make it really easy for someone to give you that data. I'm gonna ask you about Instagram. There is an account that I see that does the, like, this or that all the time, but they don't give you any way to actually tell them. I've been on Instagram story and I'm like, I would vote, but you haven't given me an option.

Oh, you mean it's the one where I have to pause it and actually type out an answer?

Have to like send them, cuz that, like, if you do the Comment things, like you can comment now and it's glory. But you used to have to send a DM. Yeah, I don't want to send a DM if I think there's a post.

That's difficult to collect the data.

Spend 10 seconds adding in.

Yeah. Moral of the story, don't make it hard to collect data. Don't make it hard for them to give you data. Don't make it hard to organize and collect the data.

Okay. Our next, we are in the—

We'll say we get to know your customers.

Our next tip.

Our next bit is analyzing market trends and competitors. You can use tools like Google Trends. Trends, Pinterest, TikTok, and just watch for trends. What's a trend? Something you see all the time. If you see one particular color coming up and going crazy, like the fastest option I could think of is last year when the Barbie movie came out and everything went pink. If you did something in pink, you were on trend and it was likely to sell. Right now it's pink and green for Wicked at this exact moment. I don't know how long that's going to stay. It's also Christmas, so red and green. Like if you have on-brand color, that's just colors, but like if you're looking at your products If you see a certain style of t-shirt is going crazy and you sell t-shirts, that is a great use of market research. Or looking at what kind of mugs, watching where are the sales going. So you can look at Google Trends, you can look at Pinterest, you can look at TikTok and just kind of like observe. Or my absolute favorite is borrow from your competitors. Learn from competitors. Learn is a very passive word. I borrow. So take a look at what your competitors— know who your competitors are. We've talked about that before. You must have competitors in your space. Look at what they're doing. Look at what stuff is always selling out versus what stuff is ending up in clearance. If they have stuff ending up in clearance, don't use that as inspiration for your products. Use the stuff that's selling out as inspiration. Look for commonalities. Look for gaps. If you see that your competitors are missing a big market, they're— maybe they're missing one of those trends that you saw or interpretation on that. Then that gives you a way to improve upon their products. And that is like very healthy competition right there.

Yeah. And be careful when you look at your competitors, because it's easy to go, okay, they're launching a lot of stuff, but no one knows whether it sells. There's a few ways to do that. If they're on Etsy and don't have their sales locked down, you can go to their shop and where it says like Melissa's Jewelry Co. That's not actually the name of our business. 10,000 sales. If you click the button, if you click where it says 10,000 sales and it's an actual button, it will show you everything that's sold in order and you can see, okay, which of these is selling again and again. And if they don't have that, you can look on like their social media and see, okay, what are people responding to? What's getting comments? What's getting likes? You can kind of try and reverse engineer it a little bit. If you go on their site and there's stuff that's sold out, say in variations, certain colors, you can go, okay, I'm getting some data there.

You can even go on Amazon.

You can sell.

And something that I love with that is looking at how many of this product has sold in the past month. So like I did that kind of research this past year with my Halloween funnels where I had witch hat earrings and then I was going to try doing ghosty earrings. Why? Because when I was looking on Amazon for competitors or inspiration, stuff like that, I saw that ghosts were outselling witch hats, like mega, mega. I don't remember the exact numbers, but it was a huge difference. But by that time I couldn't get more ghosty. So I was like, oh well, I'll take a look at ghosts next year and see how they're doing. Tracking with competitors is timeless. If it takes you production time or you're ordering, like, it can be a little iffy.

And there's other tools to sort of— Pinterest can be a little bit challenging because it will show you stuff over a longer time period. I know someone who was getting married and they were looking at wedding dresses and every time they find one, they click on it and it's last season because they move quick. And it— I haven't really thought about it, but you could combine it with the other tools we're going to talk about in a minute and kind of go, okay, Found this on Pinterest, and I'm going to look and see, okay, is it in these other places? Google Trends is a tool that lets you put in a word or a keyword, and you can see the kind of graph of how many searches it's getting. So if we do, like, if we put in, we're just putting the word Christmas, it probably starts picking up around September-ish time, gets to December, and then dies. But you can look up things like colors and keywords. And if, unless I was thinking about when do I launch my Halloween collection, she could put in You can put in the word Halloween, but you also put in slightly more specific searches like Halloween earrings, and then you go, okay, when do people start looking for these? Are people looking for these at all? And kind of see where the trend is. You can go on there and it will show you some of the top trends, but they're probably not products. It's kind of like, what dress did Kim Kardashian wear to the something award? Like, that's the big trend. And like some football matches are like, yeah, it's—

Or get alerts.

Go in with your keywords.

What's the top 20 keywords of the day?

And the other one you talk about is TikTok, and TikTok is really good because it's very up to the minute. Everything in TikTok moves very quickly and it shows you really recent stuff. I notice, I don't know if it's a test or something, sometimes I'll go on TikTok and be like, this is old, and like a few in a row. So I think they like are kind of trying things out, but for the most part you can see, okay, this thing was posted today or yesterday. Like it's really moving up to the timeline. You can go in, you can search for things and you can see what people are talking about. People are moving fast on TikTok. And it's the whole platform is kind of trends, like what song is trending, what dance is trending. And then you can take that and go, okay, if people are doing that thing, then trends, colors and fashion and all the different things that you might be creating and go, okay, how can I use this for me? And doing some of that research and you can totally go on Pinterest and then double check, okay, how is it doing on Google or TikTok? And just having that understanding gives you that competitive edge, and it lets you know that you have the best shot of things happening. You never guarantee it, but you kind of want as much validation before you launch a product. And the best way to get validation is to launch it, but you kind of want to do as much research as you can beforehand. We did. Our next tip is to go ahead and start small and test products. You can save time and resources by validating ideas before you fully commit. One of the biggest mistakes, it's kind of hard, sometimes it's a big mistake and sometimes it pays off, but the order $100 of a product before you know it's going to sell can either, like, you have a bunch of stock and it all sells out. That's probably the least likely outcome. Or you buy $100 and you can't get this thing to move and you're stuck with these things forever.

So, then you end up in a marketplace trying to get of your bulk inventory. And as soon as that product comes into trend and you go, dude—

and there's, there's a bunch of ways to do this, and it's like, you should always set up for that. Sometimes, like, set— like, having a limited run, doing things like pre-orders to help you gauge demand, having really good suppliers. I know for the most part, if they have plenty of stock, my supplier, I can order up until like I think it's like 8 o'clock, maybe 10 o'clock at night or something, and it will be here tomorrow. So even if— I've done this before and it's slightly terrifying, but sometimes I'll be like, oh, I know this is going to sell if I leave it in stock. I will let it sell and I have them on the way and they'll be here tomorrow. But if you're Origin, you have some much longer lead times, it's slightly more difficult, but having liquid suppliers makes this much easier. And Melissa kind of does this in an unusual way. But you're a dual target.

That feels like the very definition of my business. So I do microtests for the past few years, pretty much every week, or at least 20, 30 times a year, where I put out a limited run collection where I have very tiny quantities. This is a collection I'll go live on Facebook, think like QVC style. I'll go live on Facebook to my audience and I'll have like 8 to 10 products that I've literally made one of. I have made one of this product. I have a prototype done. That is it. I know what supplies I have. I know how many I can make, but I've only done one. And I'm able to see immediately what things are popular and sell. And which ones flop. And usually the things that I think are absolutely stunning and going to move, sell immediately, stay in my hands and in my studio for a very long time. And the things that I'm like, I just need another piece to fill this collection, goddammit, that is fugly, putting it up, boom, gone. Not 100% reliable, but about 80% of the time that happens. But it gives me— I don't have much investment because I've only made one. And it's all like, I'm a jewelry designer, so like I am always getting and testing and having new supplies and stuff. Like, let's try this combination, let's try that combination, let's try this color, let's try that color. What is going to work? What are they going to want? Once I have enough of those winner tiny collection pieces, I can put that out and release it as a full collection. I know I've had a much better shot of reaching it, of them all selling and selling out a ton, because I've run the tests. I know which ones are popular. How they're explaining it.

Yeah. And I think another thing is, and it totally depends on your business, but sometimes where if something doesn't sell, you can take those supplies and put them together in a different way. If you sell mugs and your new collection is just 10 designs, if they don't sell, like if you haven't made them in advance, if you're like print on demand, it doesn't matter so much if they don't sell because I'll just print a different design that does sell later. If you sell t-shirts. A black t-shirt's a black t-shirt. So if you can do that anyways, kind of find, find things where if this combination of raw materials doesn't work, I can use them for something else. Helps to eliminate the risk a little bit.

Print on demand is so great for that. So absolutely great. And you'll see a lot of people in the print on demand world, they will do what I just explained on a massive scale where I am testing like 10 products, they might test 100 to find 1 or 2 that people go crazy over. And that's the reality of testing products. Like, if you could do the research, if you can get people to actually be honest with you about what they actually want to spend real money on, good luck. But if you can do that, then the research side is excellent. Otherwise, it is just massive amount of testing.

And, and there's print on demand where you have another person do it for you. But there's also, if you do things like mugs and stuff, you can kind of print as orders come in instead of having stock ready. So even if you're not using the print-on-demand company, like my business is print-on-demand in a slightly different way. It's all personalized. I don't do anything until it comes in. For the most part, I know, like I have the blank items. I know that if they don't sell, if I like do like a different Yeah, a different design and a different font, or I know for me it's probably because it needs better tags and photos for the most part. I know it's gonna sell. It's that, um, for the most part, cause I'm buying blanks, I know that those items sell. I know that like when I'll check stock with my supplier and I had like 1,000 of them sold yesterday, I was like, people are buying these. If they don't sell, it's normally my fault for some reason.

Time of year, all of that. Cause you're saying that and like, I don't know why, but you're talking about blanks and like the first one that popped into my head was aprons. And aprons do phenomenal holiday season with like, oh, Nana and I make cookies, like cookie apron kind of thing. Great in the holidays. In the summer, you change out your design. You don't do cookies, you do like gardening. Same product, different designs on it.

Yeah, and even think about the print on demand. You could say, okay, I want to start stocking aprons. I'm gonna put up a print on demand with a print on demand supplier, and if I sell 10 of them, then I will switch from the print on demand to me doing them in-house where I have more product margin. Absolutely change things out over time.

Do the ads, do the testing like that, because you're not going to make any money having someone else fulfill your print on demand, or you have to sell a lot to make any money. But using that as a test, and then you have like zero investment cost.

Especially if you're thinking about new techniques or new equipment. If you're like, okay, I think we could do mugs, but there's 8 billion people selling mugs on Etsy. I'm gonna do print on demand and see if my mugs sell before I go and buy the, the sublimation printer and the mug press. You can use that to test like a new technique, or you could just use it to test a new design. So our next tip is leveraging customer feedback and data. So we kind of talk about collecting this before, but actually making sure that you use this data to inform your decisions. Because there is a lot of data that even if you aren't intentionally doing things like polls, that you are getting. If you're asking people for reviews, there is a goldmine of data in there. Depending on what reviews tool you use, some of them will do this for you, but the easiest way that anyone can do is you can stick these all in ChatGPT and say, okay, Pull out the nuggets for me. Like, I'm creating a new collection. I want to know what people think about blah blah. Tell me. Because eventually over time you'll end up with hundreds of reviews and it's hard. I want to read everyone, honestly.

But it's hard to do that.

Look through all these reviews and find the common themes. Look through all these reviews and tell me what people— that I'm not doing that people want. Tell me what I'm doing that people really like. You can upload a CSV. Like, whatever way, whatever form you can get reviews in, take it and put it in there and it will tell you. It doesn't have to be ChatGPT, whatever AI thing you like. But that's a real easy way. So reviews are a big one. Looking at your inbox. Sometimes people will tell you stuff, even if you don't want them to. And that can be good and bad. Comments on social media. Over time, try and gather these somewhere so they're easy to find. But there is like a million different places that people are giving you feedback. Wanted or unwanted. And it can be easy to ignore because you don't really think about it, or it's not super relevant at the time. But when you come back, it's like, okay, I'm ready for this. What have people been telling me? Like, sometimes you might think you don't have feedback. When you actually sit and look at it, you're like, okay, actually people have been telling me that they want— I'm going back to the previous week's example.

I would totally go for glow-in-the-dark shoes.

For years. And actually People have been telling me about colors they like. They've been telling me they like Velcro instead of laces. People have been telling me that they want them to have built-in fans so their feet get sweaty. People have been telling me they want— some of this advice is nonsense and don't do anything with it. Don't try and build fans into shoes. Being— look through and go, okay, people are telling me this. You actually use that.

But you can use that if you have a vintage shoe or a shoe that's got good airflow and designed mesh and all of that. Be like, it's like there's an air conditioner on your toes. That actually sounds awful. That sounds like freezing cold feet.

All these people are telling me, nice. It's what's that quote about when, like, when inventing the car, people didn't want a car, they wanted a faster horse.

Oh, if Ford asked people what they wanted, they would've said a faster horse.

Yeah. So it's like people are telling me I want a faster horse, but you're like, okay, actually what's like that, that's why we're entrepreneurs.

We're the innovators.

So taking that thing that people are saying like, okay, I can't actually put fans in shoes, but what I can do is this.

Here's cool Geltech in your sole and it's vented. And this fabric that is when it gets wet and it's summertime and your feet are feeling swamped, when this fabric gets wet, it's actually gonna be cool.

Yeah. I like— totally depends on your climate. If I'm somewhere hot, as much fan as possible. If I'm— if I am where I actually am, just wet. No hole. I want the shoes to be sealed.

Existed, or that I would want, and I don't own yet, but we get more farm stuff at my house and it might happen. They have coats. Carhartt makes coats that have a button you press, the coat is heated.

I can— my supplier has the coats. You can buy them and they also sell their battery packs.

If I said I wanted more data in a coat, no, what I actually want is a battery pack heater in the coat. Dang it. But I didn't know that was a possibility. We're the entrepreneurs, we're the visionaries. We see possibilities that the regular people can't dream of.

You're a chuck. But the main point is, take the research, take the data that people are giving you, and actually make use of it. Because you probably, if you've been in business long enough, have this data that you're Ignore. All right, our next tip is starting to be a little bit innovative and solving problems. If people aren't telling you what they want, you need to start looking out for the problems that people have. Identify the main pain points, and again, you can ask people for these, but create products that provide some sort of solution to that. If I look at reviews of competitors, if I go on Amazon and look in the reviews, Sometimes you'll be in like every single person in every single interview says, but it doesn't do this, it doesn't do this. Or like, you're like, okay, there's a competitor that's selling a lot of these, but everyone keeps complaining that they don't last long, so you make them more durable. Like the, my glow-in-the-dark shoes, everyone always says after a bunch of wear, the Velcro stops being sticky. And you're like, okay, you know what, I'm gonna have electromagnet Tie and shoes.

You said that and my brain immediately went, these are hover shoes. They use magnet tech and you can fly.

Yep. But like, people talk about durability, so you make the more durable version. People moan and complain that it's not in the right color that they want. People complain about lots of stuff. What is the theme that you keep seeing when you look through all these reviews?

It—

I'm trying to think of the exact words, but people And give, like, if they're not giving the feedback to you, they're giving the feedback to someone else. But looking there, looking at what trends you can see, sometimes just going out and walking around shops, doing some window shopping and going, okay, I can see that in it. Like, I haven't noticed this before, but once I go in a shop, you can see every single one of them has stuff in purple. Right now, Highland Cows, or Heilan Coos as I like to call them, but I don't have to speak properly on a podcast, but like every shop suddenly seems to have them. They've become a trend. And it's like, okay.

I would be buying one from every shop.

So I feel like I'm in Scotland and they, you know, I could have the real cow if I wanted to, but the Scottish shops, traditional places, always have that. But it's spread out to have some fashion shops now. And using a bit of your own creativity to come up with something that's a little bit more unique. I can see where things are going. I don't have access to this thing, and I'm going to innovate a little bit without going too off the rails. Aight.

So, on— we'll keep on Highland Coos and innovation. There is an artist I follow who paints Highland Coos. She does like all the research stuff that we're talking about. She paints Highland Coos as— it's all watercolor art stuff, but she has like Christmas coos, and she has Star Wars coos, and she has Marvel coos, and she has Lord of the Rings coos, and all of this. And then she offers, she'll, she'll share a whole bunch of work that she's doing behind the scenes, watching the, do the drawing and stuff. And then she'll release it on her website and the first 50 prints that sell on the website are free, just pay shipping, and then it becomes a paid thing. She's testing, testing, testing, and the ones that she can now judge, like how fast does that 50 sell out? Like, what's popular? What's trending right now? As we talk, and I mentioned Wicked before, I expect to see Elphaba and Glinda coos.

A while ago, research for a new collection, I was looking at the kind of baby trends and like it seemed to center around a different woodland animal. It was a bear and then it was a fox. I can try and get on the trend a little bit before it happens. Yeah, just see what people respond to and that kind of innovating. That way. It's like, I'm not suddenly going, okay, foxes are popular, so I am going to— trying to think of animals now. So I'm gonna put spiders on everything. You might go, okay, that is crazy. That's true, baby cows.

That's not gonna work too well.

But yeah, like, I'll say something now, like dolphins. You're like, okay, people like foxes, suddenly into dolphin. Like, there's not a big connection there. You're like, okay, woodland animals seems to be the common theme. What other things are out there What can I make a little bit cute and see if it sells? So today we covered our 5 steps around winning products: understanding your audience, analyzing trends, testing different ideas, leveraging feedback, and using your innovation to solve problems. So why not try these out today and share your results over in our Facebook group? And a good way to test out your products and get some sales is by running a flash sale. And if you want to run your first flash sale, this weekend, go over to theproductgrowthlab.com/flash where you can grab our Flash Sale in a Snap guide that gives you everything you need to get your next flash sale going. Thanks for tuning in to the Product Growth Lab podcast. We hope you found today's episode insightful and inspiring. If you enjoyed the show, leave a review. It helps us reach more creative entrepreneurs just like you. Stay connected and keep experimenting. Follow us on your favorite podcast platform and don't forget to join our community for more resources, tips, and support. Until next time, keep growing and creating.