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2. find if any products exist to solve the problem. If there are a few of them, try to guesstimate the market size. Mostly likely, there is a market for that if the number is ok. If there are many existing players, there is no need to validate because obviously there are many competitors in the field.
1) Find niche subreddits where people that are your target audience hang out, observe communities, help people out, participate in the discussion, if someone has a problem that your product can solve, then help them out in the comments and see what their feedback is
2) Learn a bit of SEO - you don't need to be an expert to fix some low-hanging fruits and get your product in front of people who might be using search engines to find a solution for their problem. Downside: SEO can take a few months to a year to kick-in, so if you have a very short time-window, it might not work immediately
3) Create a landing page and a sign-up list - see how many people sign up
4) Find bloggers and community members that write about your topic, cold email them telling them about your product. Be prepared for the response rate to be pretty low, but it can work.
5) LinkedIn - ok, ok I know I might get downvoted for this, but imho LinkedIn still has some of the best organic reach of any social platform, so you might as well use it to post about your product (esp. if it is a B2B one)
FYI - for consumer tech products, willingness to use something doesn't equate to willingness to pay for something, which you have to account for when doing research.
Can someone recommend common places to list new side projects? In my case small SAAS app for business folk. Surely there’s spots on the web for this?
1) Where do people that have use for your app hang-out or post about the problem that your app solves? Are there any online forums or subreddits or facebook groups where your target audience is? If so, I would join these communities and when someone has a problem that your product solves, I'd help them in the comments and point to your product. Many groups are (for a good reason) hostile to adposts, so your best bet would be to spend time and engage with the community as opposed to going for direct adposts immediately.
2) Post on LinkedIn (consistently) using keywords / hashtags that target your customer base. Use infographics or tutorials of your product to showcase how it solves a problem. I know LinkedIn can be a pain, but imho it has one of the best organic reaches of any big social media platform and it's free (apart from the time it takes to write and post).
Sell one unit to someone. In fact, do it before you start coding. Coworkers, business contacts. "If I built X would you pay for it? Yes? Cool, what's a fair price?" Get one of those first, then open your terminal. Aside from showing there is a non-zero market for your wares, it also proves that you are willing to do the hard part which is the selling, not the building. If you won't do the hard part then you are wasti…
I did this with an idea I had. I thought of making a collaborative online video editor, like Google docs for video. First thing I did was talk to filmmakers. The idea was unanimously panned. I was immediately told it sounded like a terrible idea. Turns out filmmakers don’t want collaboration in post production, they want control. My tool would have taken that away from them. This saved me hundreds of hours of develop…
Look for microtraction, and then experiment as much as possible.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I did this with an idea I had. I thought of making a collaborative online video editor, like Google docs for video. First thing I did was talk to filmmakers. The idea was unanimously panned. I was immediately told it sounded like a terrible idea. Turns out filmmakers don’t want collaboration in post production, they want control. My tool would have taken that away from them. This saved me hundreds of hours of develop…
And yet frame.io seems to be doing very well, it is popping up more and more places.
> Adobe’s $1bn acquisition of Frame.io took many in the industry by surprise [1]
I am surprised. Perhaps this is a case of me not talking to enough people, or maybe people really don’t know what they want until you show it to them.
[1] https://www.ibc.org/trends/what-frameios-1bn-sale-says-about...
Edit: One thing that helps is if your widget is a good-enough replacement or alternative for something that people are already buying for 10x the price of your widget. Even if your widget kinda sucks (it will! it does!), people will be so happy that they're saving 10x of their $$$ that they won't mind your widget's flaws... and they'll enthusiastically tell you which flaws matter and which ones don't, so you know how to improve it in the future.
tl;dr: 1) Pick a widget category where you can make a thing 10x cheaper than the competition. 2) Get a customer. 3) Talk to them. 4) Take notes.
Some things I've found helpful (I run a niche search engine and curation platform): 1) Find niche subreddits where people that are your target audience hang out, observe communities, help people out, participate in the discussion, if someone has a problem that your product can solve, then help them out in the comments and see what their feedback is 2) Learn a bit of SEO - you don't need to be an expert to fix some lo…
Here is an example: https://old.reddit.com/r/Denver/comments/qshpov/i_started_ma...
522 votes and 51 comments on a relatively small subreddit put it in near the top for a day or two. Idea validated.
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And yet frame.io seems to be doing very well, it is popping up more and more places.
That is a good point, I haven’t been following film industry closely at all for the last 5 years but > Adobe’s $1bn acquisition of Frame.io took many in the industry by surprise [1] I am surprised. Perhaps this is a case of me not talking to enough people, or maybe people really don’t know what they want until you show it to them. [1] https://www.ibc.org/trends/what-frameios-1bn-sale-says-about...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And yet frame.io seems to be doing very well, it is popping up more and more places.
That is a good point, I haven’t been following film industry closely at all for the last 5 years but > Adobe’s $1bn acquisition of Frame.io took many in the industry by surprise [1] I am surprised. Perhaps this is a case of me not talking to enough people, or maybe people really don’t know what they want until you show it to them. [1] https://www.ibc.org/trends/what-frameios-1bn-sale-says-about...
I also pondered starting building a company and tools for filmmaking and bailed out, and I’m glad I did. My background is CG & VFX, so not editing exactly, but talking to people in VFX helped my business partner and I see that VFX software is thin margins, super competitive, and not a good long term strategy in the US.
Anyway, the success of frame.io could still mean your takeaway was correct that editors don’t want many cooks in their personal kitchen, but also that your view of collaborative editing could have been widened into include a broader range of collaborative activity. In some sense, pro filmmaking is almost always highly collaborative already, not with multiple editors, but definitely with multiple people.
Another possibility is that frame.io doesn’t resonate with editors, but does resonate with many other people making films, ads, social media videos, movies, etc. It might not be the editors that are buying it. It also might not be experienced filmmakers buying it either; one problem with interviewing the experts is that they rarely understand the markets for non-experts…