81–90 of 101 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ah, but getting your tweet actually read is a whole other ball of wax.
Step 1: Have 100,000 followers Step 2: Instant Marketing Success Step 3: Tell everyone how easy social media is
I imagine one could swap “Have” for “Pay to work with someone who has”.
There's this upcoming trend of "building in public". Founder/Developer sharing their journey to their audience while trying to get traction. I agree that launching your product to an engaged and consolidated audience give a boost but I also think that depends on which type of product you are building. For sure you need at least to have an MVP to show to your users.
I applaud your success. To me it seems that by putting distribution first, or focusing on problems to solve, that you typically end up with markets or problems you are personally not really excited about. I've done this exercise many times. I can either work on something I think is cool and there is a niche market for, but does not really "solve" a problem but addresses a "want", or I can work on something I have zer…
You really hit the nail here! I have written about this ( https://www.indiehackers.com/post/the-myth-of-interesting-bo... ) and I am still struggling to break from this. If the problem is interesting, it is probably cutting-edge in some way, ergo it is hard to solve, hard to bootstrap. The best way imo to break this, is to build a bunch of small things that individually work but collectively point to and solve a more…
Not sure if this fits your description, but the first thing that comes to mind are the tidyverse packages
> Distribution before product I don't like this new startup trend[1][2], nor do I think it actually works. Literally all of those examples are the opposite of what the blog post is claiming. They did have a product: Hotmail had the service built out, Eventbrite had the service built out, and there was a Dropbox before you could refer your friends to it. There are examples of what the author is claiming, but most are…
Marketing magic by marketing gurus is it's own thing. They can artificially prop up a product using efficient advertising, connections, or lots of cash.
Ironically this is going to work because gathering a following for an interesting project is one way to do marketing. Lots of programmers succeed because they make tutorials, or they participate in a community where they build up a reputation.
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I think the idea is you do give a demo, just that you dont go crazy engineering-wise to implement NASCAR login, kubernetes scale-out and all sorts of stuff before you've tested the market for interest. It is basically taking the idea of MVP down a notch to BVP (barely viable product). I've never done this, but it makes sense. Why spend the engineering effort to go from Demo --> BVP --> MVP when you can just do the fi…
What's the definition of MVP then?!
I would iterate until you find a problem that people are willing to pay a lot of money to fix.
> Distribution before product I don't like this new startup trend[1][2], nor do I think it actually works. Literally all of those examples are the opposite of what the blog post is claiming. They did have a product: Hotmail had the service built out, Eventbrite had the service built out, and there was a Dropbox before you could refer your friends to it. There are examples of what the author is claiming, but most are…
I'm only advocating for reducing uncertainty around distribution before building; not eliminating it entirely. It's important to at least have a strong growth hypothesis that you've validated to some degree . That's all I have right now - hypotheses.
> Distribution before product I don't like this new startup trend[1][2], nor do I think it actually works. Literally all of those examples are the opposite of what the blog post is claiming. They did have a product: Hotmail had the service built out, Eventbrite had the service built out, and there was a Dropbox before you could refer your friends to it. There are examples of what the author is claiming, but most are…
I think strategies differ depending on:
- How new the market is for that particular product
- How big of a risk is it to adopt your product vs alternatives
- How polished it looks (inverse relationship to how many solutions already exist)
In some cases, you may need a much more polished MVP to get people to bring out their credit cards. If your product is the only one of its kind (and is in high demand), the UI is less important in v1.