Charge even before day 1

I got super encouraged to start building my first app with bubble.io after hearing that I don’t need investors to start a startup. After weeks of fighting the interface, I spent even more time making the product in Adalo. Months later, I returned to potential users and nobody wanted to use the app, including me. I had vision that I’m my own customer and will ship something I’ll use myself, but halfway I thought I also want somebody else to use it. I ended up somewhere in between. Sadly, this result gave me no joy nor cash.

I failed to find customers for 4/4 products I didn’t presell. People weren’t returning to something they didn’t need, and I couldn’t get any feedback to work with. Absence of feedback for growing my startups killed them. After this happened, I said "never again do I want to be desperately chasing the first 3 users to signup".

When launching freemium or free-trial products with my partners, we start with preselling the idea at least 20 times. This helps us realize who needs it more, what are the features customers need, which part of the product is useless, and how we position it after it’s ready.

Sometimes makers with 0 users tell me: “I put months of hard work into building my product. I won’t kill it before someone uses it”. Well, I usually lasted for 2-3 weeks, then the emotional pressure took over and I stopped paying for the domain.

There is a scale from 1 to 10 for product validation. 1 - collecting emails to validate the idea and not asking for money. 10 - preselling for the full price. Selecting between 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 depends on how quickly we want to find our ideal customer profile. I tried collecting emails for validation. It left me with 50 emails and 0 sign-ups. My MAU metric in the first months was way higher when all guys who joined beta paid to be there.

For me, startups have never been a hobby, and I always wanted to make money with them. I’m not in the position of investing years into products without expecting output. For everyone like me, it's safer to validate the demand before putting effort.

It’s very challenging to ask for cash while you only have air. But it's possible. I sold the product when the demo was just 3 slides on Canva. Try at least 3 different audiences with 40 calls in each before giving up on the idea. It’s close to impossible to know the ideal customer profile before making many calls.

Right people will buy our product after they see the right solution to their problem at the right time. Look:

I meet a thirsty stranger who’s been going through the desert for 5 days. He’s got a $100 note and I promise that I’ll get him water in 3 hours if he pays $100 upfront. He pays the full amount upfront. I meet the same stranger on a city street one month later. Same person, same offer, but he won’t even give me his email to validate he’d like some water. My goal is to find the right person, in the right condition, at the right time. Matching components of this equation takes time, but allows me to find easy sales to thirsty people. When Marcus partnered with me to scale Feedbucket.app, it took us 20 calls to find that experienced web developers and agencies convert easiest.

Let's say you're creating a tool for freelancers that lets them showcase their portfolio. You try to push every freelancer into it, but no one uses it. Then, you select top 3 buyer personas and start selling. Your mediocre tool for freelancers turns out to be an amazing tool for motion designers with over 3 years of experience who started freelancing less than 6 months ago and now want to conveniently manage their portfolio to get more clients.

It’s so weird to realize that such product can make millions of dollars a year, but with a 90% chance the founder drops it after full-stack engineers, copywriters, email marketers, and graphic designers call it useless, and say "the founder must be mad to ask money for it". A committed founder makes their way to their ideal users, builds on their feedback, and then expands to other markets.

This is a one of 14 chapters of my new Startup Killers ebook. I called it "Building before finding users". DM me on Twitter, and I'll send you the copy.