Hey all!
One of the things I learned pretty quickly after joining IH was the importance of performing customer interviews. So I come up with an idea that hit all of my personal criteria. Instead of doing what I normally do -- building the product immediately and validating the idea after the MVP was built -- I decided to conduct some customer interviews to get validation before a single line of code was written.
I went onto reddit and found some niche communities to interview potential customers.
Even though I was very clunky with my line of questioning, I ended up with the answer I needed: this problem has already been solved, just not in the way I imagined.
Exploring the problem with potential customers was extremely valuable and I have IH to thank for that. Now instead of spending months of development time working on a product to reach validation, I spent a few hours on the weekend coming to the same result.
🔑:
You can read more about the journey in my latest blog article: https://erock.io/customer-interviews-killed-product-idea/
Just because your ideas has been solved in a different way doesn't mean people don't want your solution! If Apple followed that logic they never would have created the iPhone because Nokia's already existed for people to communicate!
But as you said, Reddit is an awesome place to validate ideas. It’s got a whopping 430M+ active monthly users and over 360 billion page views per year. You can find anyone and everyone there in terms of target audiences for potential ideas!
A great way to find related subreddits to the most common one you think your target audience hangs out is using this tool: https://subredditstats.com/subreddit-user-overlaps
I've used it a bunch and can highly reccomend!
I think it was Henry Ford that said, I'm paraphrasing, if he had asked people what they wanted, they would have said a mechanized horse not a car.
I'm not convinced that asking people about a product is the best way. But if you do ask, the fact that it has been solved IS A GOOD SIGN! It means the market has already validated the idea, you can bring your twist to it or even duplicate it. There's often space for many participants.