Q&A: "How can I sell flash cards to pharmacy students?"

Q&A: "How can I sell flash cards to pharmacy students?"

This week we've been looking at deciding on an idea. As part of that process, you need to think about your ideal customer: who is best suited for this product or service of yours.

Sometimes people worry that the market they've chosen is too small. I think you should have the opposite worry: that you're trying to reach so many people that your offer isn't specific enough.

The listener who called in today has made a set of flash cards to help pharmacy students memorize generic drug names, but is having a hard time finding her market. What should she try?

My side hustle is PharmaCues, which is a set of flash cards that use mnemonics and pictures to make it easier to memorize branded generic drug names. I have them up on Etsy for now just to test the waters. My question for you is how do I find and market to a very specific and small audience? My product really only is for pharmacy and pharmacy technician students, and it's a lot harder than I thought it would be to find interested people. Do you have any advice?

I actually think this is a really interesting project with some real potential. It reminds me of a story we did long ago (Ep. 137) on a guy named Mike Benkovitch, who's actually one of our writers now.

In one of his other projects, he created a course on learning anatomy for pre-med students that turned into long-term passive income of around $800/month. If I recall correctly, it also featured a lot of mnemonics and pictures, like Nour's project.

Of course, she's not finding initial success. What we have is an interesting and presumably helpful product in search of its market.

So first, I'd get some feedback on the cards. Assuming that Nour has some background in this field or at least knows some people in this field, I'd make sure that this study aid really is helpful to them. Get some real feedback on it—and if you feel confident in its value, then you focus your time on finding where the target audience might look for study aids.

My sense is she's not looking in the right place… where do pharmacy and pharmacy tech students hang out online? I'm guessing it's not Etsy.

I would imagine there are two sources:

• Specific forums or resource sites for pharmacists or pharmacy students

• General web browsing—for example, searching on Google for "pharmacy study aid" or "generic drug memorization guide." What comes up when you search for those terms?

Nour needs to be ranking for those terms in search engine results—or at least, it would help a lot if she did, because over time it would bring her free, targeted traffic. And it would be much better for her website to be the one ranking rather than just an Etsy page or something else on another platform.

So those are my suggestions—first let's make sure the product is solid, as judged by the intended audience, and then look at getting away from Etsy and to a more direct source of reaching this audience.