Has anyone here gotten ideas from end users before building anything?
I'm trying to talk to potential customers and trying to keep as much open mind as possible. Just curious - has anyone here reached out to users, talked to them, gotten ideas for products/services that you had never thought of? All before writing a single line of code? If yes, could you share your story?
Somewhat yes. The client in my case is a previous company I worked for.
The story goes like this: Two years ago, I was recruited as a full-stack engineer to build something they called the open data library for green tech which was basically a data warehouse. That is, a big database with many many poly-structured data. At that time the CTO, wanted to automatically detect the content of any file and index / store it in ElasticSearch and rely on Resource Description Framework to make sense. To my mind ElasticSearch was a poor choice (!) and also we knew little about the actual data to be able to automate the process. I was fired because I was thinking too much. A few weeks passed and I figured that it would be nice to be able to interact with data the same way we interact with source code: a version control system for data. I looked up git+RDF in a search engine and discovered not only it was a thing but that there was no solutions, people were begging for something that could work like git. Otherwise said, there is a niche for that tool but no vendor. I slept on the idea for one year. During that time, I joined another company in a completely different domain in the ad-tech industry. In Google Ads, there is a versioning of your campaigns. Exactly my idea, but applied to a another domain. Digging more the idea e.g. Django's audit trail, I had more and more clues that data versioning was thing.
To wrap up: my idea comes from a real customer(s) but it was "validated" by finding similar problems that the same software can fix.
wow, great story! thank you for sharing.
I visited companies and clients I have worked for previously and tried to sell my "idea & solution", jut to learn they are not interested in. There are two things I've learned this way. On proved to be right and the other one proved to be wrong later.
#1 proved to right in the long term: my current customers are interested in feature flags and they are less interested in configuration management. This is exactly what I've learned in those early talks.
#2 proved to be wrong. My current customers are mainly from Northern Europe and the US. In contrast to the country I'm from (and where I had those early conversations)they are very familiar with feature flagging and WANT that. What I've learned from this is not to convince people who are not ready to buy yet, but to sell to people who want what I offer.
"I visited companies and clients"
How did you make this happen? Did you approach them as a stranger, or did they already know you?
Thank you for taking the time to reply
They already knew me. I have worked for them before...
Yes - I think this is a great way to approach it.
Often, I see founders (eg in my SalesForFounders.com course) go into customer discovery/sales with an idea or pain in mind, and discover pretty quickly that there is a much better, completely different product waiting to be built!
With the first version of PostPerk, we went into it knowing a very, very vague problem I wanted to solve (helping smaller ecommerce brands find more customers). Pretty quickly landed on a solution that would work and had several signups before writing any code.
With Gymhopper, my first real startup, we started off with an idea and quickly found out it was rubbish. During the sales process, we stumbled across a much better idea solving the same problem instead.