Videos are one of the most important parts of marketing projects. Github projects without gifs get less attention. Humans are visual and don't like scouring through a readme before seeing some action first.
Painful Lesson: Always 'Show and Tell' Your Product Before You Develop It
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Re: Painful Lesson: Always 'Show and Tell' Your Product Before You Develop It
#42Asking people for their opinion on anything (in my case, it's writing) is an art. Not everyone's opinion is worth listening to. If you throw it out to the general public, you'll get a lot of stupid ones. It's better to pick a few people you respect, who are not uncritical lovers of your work. But you need to do that. As the creator, you have a blindness that it's impossible to get past all by yourself.
There is a book called "The Mom Test" that has this perspective.
I second "The Mom Test", it's a great book that can be read in an hour.
Re: Painful Lesson: Always 'Show and Tell' Your Product Before You Develop It
#43Just because the people you showed it to couldn't imagine using it doesn't mean that there aren't a lot of people out there who desperately want it and would recognize its utility to them. To other creators: 0.1% of the USA and EU is 777,000 people. OP made a very niche product, hopefully he showed people who need SEO-related products, but if you only need to sell to 10,000 people to make a profit, you might "just" h…
You are right. But I must admit response like the one I got gives you a tremendous boost to the confidence. I might go back to the earlier product someday if I learn to be a better marketer :-)
Re: Painful Lesson: Always 'Show and Tell' Your Product Before You Develop It
#44There’s a balance to be had. Show your thing too early and it can die. There’s a reason large companies don’t announce everything the moment it’s planned.
False equivalency. OP is an indiehacker with (relatively speaking) $0 marketing budget versus a large company. OP - keep validating and showing your early, "ugly" products. Marketing and market validation matter the most.
Yes, Thanks. Its all about handling my personal psychology. As an indiehacker, I need some encouragement early so I know I am not wasting my time
Re: Painful Lesson: Always 'Show and Tell' Your Product Before You Develop It
#45It's a tough balance to strike, especially with hardware. I'd love to be able to put together a preorder page to validate demand for my next McGuffin, but it's very difficult to know specs, cost, and appearance before at least a representative prototype has been tested and quotes obtained from suppliers. And it takes a great deal of time and engineering effort to get to that point. Of course I could show off somethin…
Thanks. i cant even imagine how hard it is with hardware. Dont think lean development applies there
Re: Painful Lesson: Always 'Show and Tell' Your Product Before You Develop It
#46Videos are one of the most important parts of marketing projects. Github projects without gifs get less attention. Humans are visual and don't like scouring through a readme before seeing some action first.
Read me says:
> "Hello everybody out there using minix - I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones"
Re: Painful Lesson: Always 'Show and Tell' Your Product Before You Develop It
#47You discovered why design comes before development in mature development organizations. Design, fundamentally, is a medium of communication. Creating an explainer video, creating a UI, and creating experiences are all communicating to your users how to interact with your software. Unless your users are also technical, (and sometimes even then,) if you don't know what you're going to say, starting off with implementing how you're going to say it will often lead to failure.
> careful UX and UI
> people we just confused and nobody signed up.
If you believe you did those things by yourself without interacting with potential users, not only were you not careful, but you probably didn't satisfy the bare minimum requirements for a basically functional UI/UX . User interface design and user experience design are two distinct professions with relevant college degrees and career paths. That so many developers think they can just intuit their way through these processes based on osmosis-gained knowledge is exactly why we need designers in the first place.
First, get design input on your new project. That you made something usable enough doesn't mean you can replicate that as you expand. To turn this around, a designer in a technical environment could probably hack together a PHP app that got the job done for simple use cases but it would quickly fall apart upon scaling it up.
Second, get design input on your first project. It's quite likely that your product is genuinely useful but you simply don't know how to communicate that to the user. If you can't do it in an explainer video, you almost certainly couldn't do it through an appropriate interface.
Re: Painful Lesson: Always 'Show and Tell' Your Product Before You Develop It
#48A simple maxim that our investors basically demanded of us was: "Sell, design, build". Accepting that approach had two pretty noticeable benefits:
1) We didn't spend a lot of time building something nobody wanted (which is the main theme of this post).
2) We experimented a lot with our product design because we knew we'd be getting feedback quickly and thus could take interesting risks. There was little "analysis paralysis".
Assuming you are your own target customer (in that you would actually pay money for what you're building) I think it can be too easy to conflate what you want to build ("this is fun/interesting") with what you want ("I need this and am willing part with money to get it").
This thread is a great reminder, so thanks.
Re: Painful Lesson: Always 'Show and Tell' Your Product Before You Develop It
#49A simple maxim that our investors basically demanded of us was: "Sell, design, build". Accepting that approach had two pretty noticeable benefits: 1) We didn't spend a lot of time building something nobody wanted (which is the main theme of this post). 2) We experimented a lot with our product design because we knew we'd be getting feedback quickly and thus could take interesting risks. There was little "analysis par…
How do you sell something without something to show off?
For example, let's say I have an idea for an app. Naturally I would think to design a few mockups, then post it on Twitter, Reddit, etc.
And then if people actually cared enough to sign up for an email list, then build.
So in this case, design -> sell -> build .
Re: Painful Lesson: Always 'Show and Tell' Your Product Before You Develop It
#50I would recommend reading both Inspired and Empowered by Marty Cagan to help you think about your product journey. Very relevant to what you'll be building, and personally I found Empowered challenged me in ways that both made me uncomfortable and also better at my job as a Product Manager.
Thanks for the recommendation. Will definitely read it