👨💻 Are you doing customer discovery when you think of a new idea?
I'm curious how many Indie Hackers are actually talking to people before building their products? I recently built a product without talking to anyone. Now I'm going back and talking to people to make sure my product actually solves a problem.
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I didn't talk to my customers when I started. I knew there were demands because we were created something that had many competitions already but just in a different style. We used AdWords to get the initial customers and it worked. If we had started now, Adwords might not work as well because the keywords are much more expensive and competitive, but it would be a marketing/growth problem and not a validation problem.
I did customer discovery for about a month and a half before starting to come up with solutions. The problem I'm solving is obvious. How best to solve it is not.
🙈 don’t build hoping for interest.
Hard to do! I usually talk to a couple of users yes. But lately I have been fond of analysing content on subreddit (I even made some money out of it - you can read that in my last post 😅).
But yes, I keep repeating that single sentence for more than a year now.
Hey Sasa,
That's the first thing I do. Actually, I kinda build a landing page first because I want to get the idea out of my head and structure it exactly something which is ready to be sold.
Then I think who will buy it. I segment the hell out of those assumptions, and I try to go as narrow as possible. Then, because I helped a bunch of founders, I always have some favors to collect and I ask them if they know anyone in their network who fits my personas.
I try to have a few calls with them, improve the idea, and repeat the process.
f.ex it took me close to a year to start writing a single line of code for dive.fm In the beginning we wanted to do a modern intranet platform, then a private Spotify, and now we're actually a mix of a private Spotify + a smarter audio recording app :))
But even if your idea is spot on from the beginning, you learn more about how to pitch it by talking to ppl. You learn even the words they use to describe the problem, and just that is super valuable in order for you to properly test your landing page & business feasibility imo
Thanks for sharing your process! Yeah just the 10ish people I've talked to have been super helpful. Also, I feel like it's given me inspiration for other ideas to work on as well. Its also helped me get a good signal about the idea I'm working on (I haven't gotten great signal on it, but I also need to talk to more people)
EDIT: also, it takes real will power to not start building something, and really understand your audience. It's super impressive that you took close to a year of time to understand your audience before building your product. 😁 Everyday I try and resist the urge to "just go out and build something"
btw, I've been advised to not say to investors that we spent time figuring things out because apparently, it says that we're not good at executing...
My daily job is to mentor student startups, and get them to learn by applying these methods in their companies. I've seen it work wonders and I've perfected the mix of tools to use (from customer development, to user journeys to sprints and testing). So I was confident in the process, and maybe people can't see why it took 1 year, but during that year I've gained a much deeper understanding of the problem space and now when I talk to experts in this area they are impressed with how well I understand issues related to culture development, employee alignment, knowledge sharing... totally worth it, but still i have to pretend that I came up with this overnight and in 3 months I've built an MVP... so I just play the game, take the advice but still keep my own convictions.
VC is a strange world. Don't hate the player hate the game 😅
Going to be honest - I did - and got a bit scared off! One of the first people I spoke to was so keen for a new product in the industry to solve their problem that they started putting pressure on and asking when it would be available!
I was literally at the research/idea validation stage, had no idea how it was going to be built (I was not technical at the time) and so afterthe conversation, instead of feeling excited thinking, great - there seems to be a need, I was panicked thinking "God, it's going to take me ages to build this and they will just be waiting....thinking hurry up!"
It's been 18 months since then - I am getting close - but my product is still not finished yet...
Yes yes yes! We're using customer discovery methods like the Stripe framework Customer Problem Stack Ranking and user interviews all the time. We used these methods back when we were just an idea and we still use them every week now. They help us to improve our value proposition and messaging, our onboarding experience, our customer segment targeting and our product roadmap prioritization.
Customer discovery never ends, so fall in love with the process early on ❤
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