How to describe (and market) an app which doesn't fit any niche

You need to force yourself into a niche or different niches. You're going to have a hard enough time geting people to buy your product, let alone trying to educated them on a concept they don't understand. It's an easy exercise, really.

Tabbles is like _______ except for it _______ and _______.

Tabbles is like combining _______ and _______.

Tabbles is a _______ that also _______.

Obviously, those aren't meant to be slogans - but more a way for you to think of and possibly explain your product to prospects. Once you can frame Tabbles using already-familiar reference points, you can build your marketing material and copy from that.

This is the classic trap with product development. You've created a product to solve a problem, not to serve a market. Solving a problem is great, but serving a market is profitable.

So you've created this app, now what? You need to find a market you can serve profitably. Since there is no "file tagging and more" market, you need to find a market that values what you've created.

Are you a killer photo organizer? Could this be used to help HR organize resumes?

I don't know what the answer is, so you need to visit digital photography forums, talk to someone in HR, etc., but find a market.

Which brings me to my point: Markets are conversations. You need to choose a market to service otherwise you don't know who to converse with.

What would be interesting is to have a flash or javascript page where people can try it out, and so as they, and others, move files, they can see how it would work.

Nothing helps people understand like actually trying a demo of a product.

If you can have it support many people, so, I move a file, and I see that other files are in my virtual folder, with some id for the person that moved it (perhaps the last four digits of their IP address), then I can understand it a bit more.

I could create new folders and see how to create tags.

You will want to be explicit about which operating systems you support, so if it is WinXP+ and some versions of Linux, then spell that out. If there is some OS that isn't supported that is wanted then you can make it very easy to ask for it to be supported. They should be able to see poll results, or a bar graph, of which OSes are being requested, and if they reach a certain point, then you can start trying to support it. Perhaps they can give an email address if they want it supported, and want to know when it is ready.

I would suggest you do some random polling, by just asking to briefly show someone the app, and ask them:

What changes would I need to make for you to be willing to pay for this.

Don't try to sell it to that person, make certain you understand that you just want their opinion, and just leave a business card, if they are interested later.

I second James' recommendation of a quick short demo video that shows how it works.

One place you might compare yourself to is gmail's tagging functionality. Something along the lines of "Love the way gmail lets you tag your email with multiple tags? Our product lets you do the same thing with your files!"

People who have adapted to the tagging process in gmail will intuitively understand how your product works.

I think you just don't realize that you are clearly in the "desktop search" niche.

At the end of the day, your software is used to "find" documents on your computer.

It's just that you use a different approach.

So, you need to market your "desktop search" application to those customers who would be interested in your "graphical" and "tag-based" search methods.

2 cents: Your pricing page doesn't look very good*. It's confusing, has too many options, and putting the dollar sign after the amounts doesn't look professional. For a sterling example, see BaseCamp's pricing+plans page.

*at the time of writing, obviously ;-)

Read Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore. It is all about how you position, compare, market a new product.

@Opyate: thanks for the hint on the pricing page... that one is going away soon anyway. But I don't get the problem with the $ sign (basecamp has it too, and it's pretty much everywhere...)? @Mark: I know... I should do that reading.

To everyone tuned here:

we currently have little traffic and sell a few licenses (not enough to survive). Getting into a market niche is of course tempting, but the problem we solve is so generic that it would suck to get into a niche...

Getting into a product niche (like "desktop search") could make more sense, and indeed I guess we can say we're in the Document Management niche...

But in reality, what we believe we need is to give out a real free version of the software so we could get more exposure and people start getting a feel for it. This starts making sense now as we are about to launch the tag-sharing features (currently in google-beta) which are meant mostly to corporate users, and therefore we can correctly follow the Freemium path.

Thanks everyone, and comments are still very welcome :-)