Ask HN: Where do you find potential customers to validate your idea / MVP?

I tend to listen to pain points of friends or even random internet comments and seek to fix that, then have an incentive to get others.

Nothing huge but provides a living and backup over 9/5 job.

Main problem of asking friends is feedback in the form of "this is super" but often not super constructive.

But if it solves two people's problem, then it likely solves more than two. And iterate on that. Which can go from payment to organisational stubbornness to recognise their pain.

Start with your personal social circle, and/or 1st level referrals from your personal social circle. It's what Steve Blank calls "Friendly First Contacts". If you can't figure out a way to get useful feedback / sign of a reason to move forward from this group, then pivot or give up.

The other option is "spend money to blast your thing to a wide audience and hope for the best." Buy Reddit ads, Facebook ads, LinkedIn ads, Google ads, whatever. The downside to this is: it costs money (potentially a lot) and doesn't generate necessarily generate quality feedback because the people you're targeting aren't invested in helping you.

Also: read The Four Steps to the Epiphany or The Startup Owner's Manual.

I'm going through this with the app I'm building in public. The things I've done that work well are:

1. Build in public—I'm using twitter heavily to share the journey, progress, etc. I've optimised my twitter profile to make it super clear what I'm doing. https://twitter.com/Martin_Adams

2. YouTube. I'm creating deep, genuinely helpful videos aimed directly at users who have a need and are searching for problem in the direct space my product fit in. I'm creating videos teaching how to use competitor products with an opportunity to introduce what I'm building. I don't think there's any platform as accessible to tap into active search results. Here's an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6qfrRVUOO8

3. Funnel people to join your mailing list. I'm using ConvertKit and now averaging about 5 people per day just from the above two actions. My record is two days with 19 people dropping their email in. I have 124 people on my email list who are now interested and relevant to my project due to the YouTube content. My landing page is here: https://join.flowtelic.com.

4. Reply to other people on HN, Reddit, etc and try to be genuinely helpful with an opportunity to introduce what you're doing. This reply is an example of that.

From there you can chat to people on Twitter and email your mailing list directly for feedback.

Check out The Mom Test and find an audience to talk to first. Validate any idea long before you build an MVP. In my opinion it's two separate steps.

I must admit I've also fallen in your trap many times myself. It's too fun to just go ahead and build something sometimes without considering the best way to find those early users first.

For us, it was trade shows. We did the math: what would we pay per person to have them take a look at our software, and how many people did we think we'd get to come by our booth at a show? I realize this can vary by industry though, in ours a standard booth is roughly $1000 which is far more affordable than most. We learned a ton and made contact with our first customers who ended up being vital in helping us refine our functionality.