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

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

#41

Post by granshaw »

allochthon wrote: post #34

I have the same question as you. Two sources of potential feedback I've found, which are not spammy or unpleasant for people: - Adding an update to an Indie Hacker product profile with a link to a blog post - Adding a post to the "Share Your Startup" thread in r/startups, which has been a thread that is started on the first of each month [0] But, in general, I have the same questions as you, so I don't imagine this w…

I'm not very experienced as a founder, but I put very low weight in audiences on sites like indie-hackers, r/startups, HN, product-hunt... it's a very specific kind of person who hang out there – mostly just tech and growth folks, and super-gung-ho-early-adopter types, who are a poor substitue for actual long-term customers

I would say FB groups, subreddits, meetups around your potential customers' industry are a much better start.

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

#43

Post by vuciv1 »

Maybe this answer isn't scalable, but I personally find that as long as I want to use it, I can find other people who want to use it.

Typically, posting to reddit and sharing with my friends has been helpful.

Also, I recently started a Twitter to try and meet other builders, it has been invaluable in terms of support and feedback.

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

#44

Post by jcadam »

suyash wrote: post #25
martin-adams wrote: post #6

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 th…

takes lot of courage to build in public, kudos!

Yes, especially when you know its time to abandon a project because it's not getting any traction - after you've been telling everyone about it for months. Should keep in mind nobody else is going to think much about your failed project but you :)

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

#45

Post by mindcrime »

wiggumspiggums wrote: post #18
mindcrime wrote: post #4

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 a…

+1 for 1st level referrals. But folks within your own social circle can be tricky because it might be hard to figure out their true opinion if your idea sucks. When a friend has sought my feedback, I find myself balancing between trying to be honest with being supportive and open-minded. I'm sure people have done the same to me.

Agreed. That's one reason the 1st level referrals are so valuable. They represent people where you have a nice solid, warm introduction, but yet they aren't your personal friends, and won't necessarily feel the need to lie to you to protect your feelings.

That said, I think part of the trick is to not just ask "do you think this idea sucks or not", but rather to ask probing questions that, in and of themselves, seem totally innocuous - but which will tell you if your idea has value or not. Figuring out how to that is part art / part science, and I can't claim to have completely mastered it myself either TBH. Still working on it...

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

#46

Post by mindcrime »

cmdr2 wrote: post #27
mindcrime wrote: post #4

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 a…

This worked better for me too, so far. But it may depend on what the OP is working on. I'm in a similar situation as the OP, and asked people I know if they know anyone in the target or related fields. And then further asked those people if they knew anyone, at the end of the call. I'm still in the middle of this process right now, so let's see how it goes. I don't ask if they think my product is a good idea. I ask q…

I don't ask if they think my product is a good idea. I ask questions about how they work, delve deep into the mundane details of their work, understand what the challenges are. Finally I make my own assessment of whether my product will truly be valuable to them. I do plan on pitching to some of them later, once I've a fairly good understanding of how my target users work.

I feel like that's the right way to do it. Those initial early calls aren't "sales calls" per-se, but depending on what you learn, you may well circle back to those people and try to sell them something later in the process.

All of what I did above was lifted straight from that book. I've been internalizing it for years, and still fail to follow it properly.

Same here. I have followed parts of it pretty closely at times, but it's hard to discipline yourself to stick to that more patient, rigorous approach sometimes. Too often I've been guilty of falling back into the conceit of thinking "of course this is a good idea" and starting to build stuff just because I convinced myself. :-(

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

#47

Post by IgorPartola »

For your project it might be useful to examine where you first looked for solutions before deciding to create your own. You want to find customers, not just people to give you feedback.

I have also learned the hard way that it’s better to start with customers and then find the idea to implement that you can sell to them than the other way around. I have built way too many things that scratched my own itch but nobody else seemed to need all that badly.

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

#48

Post by binarysolo »

Disclaimer: Non-dev small business owner here; I only MVPed offerings that solve a big-enough existing problem of contacts I know -- so for me the logical customers to validate are the ones with the pain points that I can comfortably access.

For people who are comfortable enough to give you a signup already I'd just reach out to them first via a cold+mass email and get conversion through numbers.

Once you get that personal connection you just wanna make sure it solves their use case; do remember how you solve it for them is often times as important as solving it itself.

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

#49

Post by apples_oranges »

harrisreynolds wrote: post #40

Following. This is something I've been thinking a lot about with WeBase (see https://www.webase.com )

Can I give you some feedback? I just watched the animation under "A database for anyone" and it irritates me that the mouse pointer is moving all over before clicking the right thing.

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

#50

Post by harrisreynolds »

takinola wrote: post #11

This is actually a very insightful question. You get them the same way you plan to get customers after you have built the product. If you do not have a way to get customers to test the idea, then you do not have a way to get customers after you build the product. The process of building an MVP includes the process of figuring out distribution. That said, it depends a lot on what type of product you are building. If y…

I really like the insight about the feedback you are getting from crickets (no feedback) and the engagement progression.

Just fix the next step and start with the first step.

Repeat until IPO (Ha!!)

Great comment.

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