To add, approximately one half of people in the real world share a common demographic category with a sliver of HN users and a fraction of a sliver of what we create.
Women have money. Go take it. Nobody else wants it in tech. (Well, aside from Groupon, Zynga, and a few other companies that missed the opportunity to make an iPhone app that you could wiggle to share photos.)
It's about what humans want. Humans act the same, for the most part, accounting for cultural differences. (Fashion is an example of a cultural difference, In Turkey, for example, men often place as much importance on being stylish as American women do.)
So, think culture development. Talk To Customers. (And don't try to flirt. Look at their faces. Write notes.) Talk to them both individually and in groups.
This is common advice, but I find it frustratingly vague. Talk to people? I talk to people all the time. Heck, I talk to women all the time — half my friends are women, I currently live with two female housemates and used to live with a third, and my mother is a middle-aged office manager. After years of talking to them, I can only conclude that I've missed the boat on making Facebook, Etsy, The Sims and Model Mayhem.
I imagine a lot of people are in the same boat. It's hard to talk to people in a way that reveals product opportunities. That's why they make things for the only people who will actually tell them what they want — themselves.
I know what you mean. When I've suggested targeting a female demographic with things that are somewhat silly, but most women just go crazy over (seen by how many women get into similar thing in several businesses) I was dismissed out of hand.
The Palm Pre used this strategy. Not that it's necessarily bad, but I don't think it's necessarily an instant cash-in either. You have to do things correctly and carefully, and I think the difference between appealing primarily to women and appealing to men is fundamentally a stylistic one.
I don't know how the hell they did it, but it worked for Palm. I was watching 'born rich' recently and one of the celebutantes says, referring to a handbag, 'it has room for my palm pilot, or paper, if you are still into that'.
They do, it's just not what you'd expect. For example, here in the UK, Volvo are big sponsors of the Twilight franchise. How does that make any sort of sense!? Well of course it does, because Twilight's core readers aren't teenagers at all, they're 30-something women. Same demographic that're buying all the Kindles.
Any ad you see that you don't understand, any product you think is irrelevant, someone must be buying it or it wouldn't exist. So, pause for a second and think, this is not for me, who is it for?
People are taught to focus on a market they understand, specifically themselves if nothing else. Women, on the other hand, are hard to understand, even to other women.
They pretty much do, it's just that women aren't the only target demographic that you can do this with. Think comic book movies, etc. They're all aiming at a very specific subset of the population and tailoring films to that group.
You may not be aware but there are a lot of other websites taking money from women. IE. shoe website innovations. I recall there was also some fashion site at TC Disrupt that reminded me of Swoopo. I wonder what happened to it.
Women are interested in much more than fashion and shoes (and there are many men who are interested in fashion and shoes). The market seems pretty poorly understood by tech innovators.
Women have money. Go take it. Nobody else wants it in tech. (Well, aside from Groupon, Zynga, and a few other companies that missed the opportunity to make an iPhone app that you could wiggle to share photos.)