Interperting Ads-Words Results

There are approximately 1.4 million monthly topical google searches to our field of business. Other than knowing that would cost a shit ton load of money for all those clicks (even at 0.1% its many hundreds of dollars a day) what does that mean? and are those 1.4 million searches looking for me or just bumbling around the web? In the land of startups you spend a surprising amount of time daydreaming about customer development. The idea being that you dont really have a business plan, you dont know much know what you are doing, and you are aggressively iterating on your brain-based business models while trying to generate real and possibly paying customers, and all at the same time as doing "real work". Steve Blank has a lot of very insightful things to say on the topic. Anywho, one of the ways you can gauge how big your market is and how many users are out there waiting to be developed is through something like google ad words. The premise being to float some ads out there pointing at your website (which is probably just a landing page anyways) and see how many people follow the trail. The more that do, the better chance you are building something that real, possibly paying people, want. For us, this number is approximately 1.4 million a month based on a handful of searches I came up with / ~1000+ = the number that actually click on the add and are possibly, maybe, kinda, sorta interested. So, what do you do with this info? Well I dont have a good answer yet. I guess you try and get your page to naturally show up for those searches, you invest in some keywords when ready, and you try and build something that people searching for those terms would be pleased to find. finger crossing and rain danging are important steps as well. But really the goal in all of this is to figure out the order of magnitude. do you have the chance at 1 user? or 500 million? Then its just as easy as making money off those new found users. Don't worry that part is super easy. Just ask Twitter.