Help! Confused about "talk to your users" before having users
Ahoy everyone 👋
I recently left my job as a software engineer with the goal of starting my own bootstrapped software business. I was a software engineer at Etsy. It was awesome to work on a platform where creatives could run side hustles, or become their own boss. I'd like to do the same for developers - find a way to help them start their own businesses or side hustles. So my initial plan is building tools to help bootstrappers.
Specifically, I'm interested in the domain, "What should we spend our time on? Is it a good idea?" Lots of people post about this in the Growth and Ideas&Validation communities. This question doesn't go away in mid-size or FAANG companies - I can promise you that. There are existing forecasting, projection, and modeling tools, so I don't feel like I'm completely inventing a market or a product space to tackle. Plus, I find this kind of thing fun 🤓
So: I'm confused. I see that the most common advice is "talk to your users," but I don't have users yet. So I've been working on the assumption that I should talk to my intended users - people running bootstrapped companies. Is that right?
My initial plan:
- Continue to engage people in IndieHackers. Here's an example.
- Start to do the same in other communities - /r/startups, entrepreneur Discord, etc.
- Cold email people running businesses with varying levels of MRR to try to get interviews.
- Chat with a few people in my network who bootstrap or do bootstrapping-adjacent things, and get a sense of what problems they face.
- Do all of these with the goal of getting meetings with people. Use "The Mom Test" as the basis of how I should use my time during these meetings.
Is this a reasonable first approach? If you were me, what would you do differently?
You definitely want to keep talking to people but you want to do it with a specific plan and goal in mind. There are two books I’d recommend (and you may already know them):
Start Small Stay Small
The Mom Test
tl:dr - have a hypothesis, find people in the market that supports your hypothesis, talk to them without revealing your ideas for a product, understand their problems, prototype, talk more, iterate, start over, re-iterate, talk, talk, talk, then build.
Hi, thanks for your comment, I wonder what would be the conversation trigger? Saying this because people, especially founders wouldn't spend time talking with random people.
Really tough :/
This is largely a fallacy we tell ourselves either because of the anxiety of going out and talking to people is too much or we let big names like Naval convince us that founders don’t have time to talk. It simply isn’t true in my experience.
People LOVE talking about their problems. Doesn’t matter if they are a founder or not. The Mom Test talks about how to start conversations so I’d really recommend picking it up.
I assume your potential market is b2b if you’re thinking about talking to founders. With one of my previous companies, I got in front of founders in two way:
Pre-prototype, I just cold emailed and told them I was new in the space and wanted to learn about the way they do business, the challenges they faced. Didn’t pitch a solution and told them I honestly didn’t have a solution.
Post-prototype, I interviewed dozens of founders as part of a book that would be released. But in the course of the interviews, I was able to drill into their specific problems in a way that helped confirm or reject the prototype my team had built. In many cases, at the end of the interview the founders were willing to stay on the call for a few more minutes to talk in more detail about their problems and experiment with the prototype.
Thank you for sharing your knowledge in the form of this awesome reply!
I'm wondering: How many of the people you asked were willing to talk to you pre-prototype?
Out of everyone I tried to talk to, I was about to speak with just over 60% of them. Many of these people eventually became leads, so I tracked them from the start and it’s easy to see the rate of response now.
Thank you for your reply!
Wow, that's a lot. I would have expected that number to be a lot lower. It's encouraging to see that it's actually so high.
I absolutely second this. And to put it in another way: if you can't find anyone willing to talk to you about a specific problem, then maybe it's not that big of an issue for them.
Asking around for feedback is also a great way to A/B test your message and get help to refine how you should frame things. I've had numerous conversations where I came out with a new elevator pitch simply by listening to how someone else would describe their challenges.
Thank you for the post-prototype suggestions for how to reach out. I will see if I can incorporate that into my plans somehow!
I'll definitely read the mom test, the way you talk about it is enough as a review for me :D
Yes, most of the ideas I have are B2B.
I voted to build something & then talk to people, since it does sound like you know which problem to tackle. If you already have an idea of how you could tackle it, then I'd build a simple landing page and continue talking to some more people to see if the solution is any good. If it is, start iterating, in case it isn't, start again from step 1.
However, if you don't have any idea yet of what you can build to help developers/bootstrapped companies then the best thing to do is indeed to just continue talking to your target audience.
That's just my 2 cents though & how I'm trying to tackle the validation stage with a project I've started up recently.
After spending the day thinking and reading about this, I think I'm still fuzzy on "how?," so back to talking to the target audience. I feel like I'm close, but not so close that doing a design would pop it into focus
Sometimes is easier to think of the opposite of what you should do and not do that. :)
i.e. If I said the best way to do all this is have a crazy idea, spend 1 year building it, hire expensive consultants, and THEN try and sell it to someone you would say I'm crazy and you'd be right.
The reason would be you just spent money/time on an un-validated business idea before finding out if it's a REAL problem and a something that people will give you cash for. The only way to do this is to talk to people using the "Mom Test" (as you suggested) to uncover problem (without offering solutions to influence them) and validate all your assumptions before doing any real work.
Trying to then solve their problems in a non scalable way (avoid the temptation to start building huge amount of clever infrastructure!). If you think version 1 of your product as disposable then you're probably on the right track. Try not to spend too much time making if perfect, if the problem is great, user will come to you.
You probably know this, but that a look at "Lean Canvas" which will help.
Good luck!
Thank you for your synopsis of the problem and the example - the nudge towards building a disposable MVP is helpful. I'm still fighting the urge to go from "zero" to "built a full SaaS" once I have a validated idea, and it's helpful to try to find new ways to frame it: "Can I learn the same amount of information by next week? By tomorrow? Can I change the scope of the problem instead?" etc
Also, thank you for the pointer to "Lean Canvas."
There are already some very good feedbacks commented on your post. So I try not to repeat it, but I second that talking to your potential users helps. But maybe talking is the wrong word, because you should not talk at all except for the questions you ask or clarifying your questions.
There are different interview methods like Jobs-To-Be-Done that can help you guide these "discussions". Don't sell them any ideas in this process and if they start talking about solutions, bring them back to the challenges they faced or how they actually solved them. This is a resource outlining the Jobs-To-Be-Done approach, if you would like to read into it: https://jobs-to-be-done.com/what-is-jobs-to-be-done-fea59c8e39eb.
Thank you for the perspective on how to approach these discussions. And thank you especially for that link - it was tremendously helpful, and it looks like it links to other resources that will be relevant. I feel like I'm going to need to read it a few more times to really unpack it
Happy to hear that! We used this on 2 of our business ideas and set the mind of our interviewees by saying: Imagine that we are writing a script for a documentary film about a certain job/task/episode/process (in your case: building a startup bootstrap). This documentary should take a while and entertain ;)
Thank you for your question! The way you worded it helped me reflect on how I approach problems myself. The answers other people have given have also helped me a lot.
I'm really impressed by how @jimzarkadas is tackling the problem you described: He's giving away lots of value for free, building an audience and a network, and now slowly launching paid products after having learned what his audience wants. I would recommend to check out his approach:
https://www.indiehackers.com/post/book-me-for-a-free-45mins-ux-feedback-and-help-session-for-your-product-a-9y-experienced-product-designer-and-developer-round-4-091bb7e22c
That said, Jake, if you'd like to have a call about bootstrapping, feel free to send me an email.
@nikwen thanks so much for referring me here! It’s an honor to see my approach giving inspiration and helping others :)
@jakevoytko happy to make a call and get to know each other! I can share all of my insights on our call, I think they can be helpful.
I quit my job too 4 months ago with no plan and idea to work on. I realized networking with focus on building relationships (not spamming people) should be priority no1 and that’s how I started these UX sessions. I asked myself “why would anybody talk to me? How can I help others so that they are interested into meeting me?”
By doing them I saw that there is a gap in the UX education and I now found myself working on this :)
Btw I am documenting everything in a public journal so you can read the full story here https://jimzarkadas.com/12-months-to-IndieHacking-09f0b50366624d6599feeced3d9d94c6
For our call just DM me on twitter and we will find a slot that works :)
Thank you for your offer! I followed up on Twitter
Cool!
I'm really inspired by your work, so I will definitely keep sharing it. You deserve it, man!
🙏
This comment was deleted 3 years ago.
Thank you! I followed up with your email in your profile
Perfect, thanks!
I built https://www.userinterviewexchange.com/ for this exact purpose. I’ve also written some blog posts about this topic as well but the short version is hypothesize a specific target market. Then reach out to those people and ask them general questions about how they accomplish the thing you might solve. The book, The Mom Test is a good intro to the subject on how to talk to users when you don’t have users.
Thanks for the reminder to treat this like a hypothesis - years ago I read stuff that Steve Blank wrote, and more recently read Lean Startup, and I liked the approach of treating it like a hypothesis that you're trying to invalidate.
Hey Jacob, I just wrote a post that might help out a bit. It mainly focusses on situations where you already have users, but I think some of the tips can apply in cases where you don't. Keen to hear what you think.
https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-to-get-users-to-talk-to-you-10-tips-from-founders-like-you-7b3e3c1d80
https://www.ycombinator.com/library/6g-how-to-talk-to-users
"It was awesome to work on a platform where creatives could run side hustles, or become their own boss. I'd like to do the same for developers - find a way to help them start their own businesses or side hustles."
Do you mean you want to start an Etsy for developers?
'Specifically, I'm interested in the domain, "What should we spend our time on? Is it a good idea?"'
This sounds like you have the same problem you're asking for help with. Could you build something that will help you understand more about your target audience, gather information and at the same time form the basis of your own product?
I'm more referring to the output - I'm not making a marketplace, but instead I'd like to find ways to empower more people to work for themselves.
This is a good question, but the problem is also that I know myself really well 😅 as a software engineer, I pick extremist positions that can go against conventional wisdom. I think it helps me outperform others as an IC, but it also creates challenges where code I wrote can work counter to others' mental models. Accordingly, I'd like to really make sure that I'm focusing on others' problems (and their perceptions of problems) instead of building something for myself, since I may find that I'm the only happy user of the thing I wrote.
Probably should've kept the job until you got an idea, validated it, created an MVP and started making $... just saying...
Why?
Puts you in a scarcity mindset when you're constantly watching your savings dwindle and not making any money. Instead of taking risks you make conservative choices.
I'm pretty comfortable with my tolerance for risk. After all, I did leave my job to start a company with a large and nonzero chance of failure. But if there's a significant difference between my up-front risk appetite and my willingness to take higher-variance strategies before reaching profitability, I'll end up agreeing with you. I'm curious to see which is true!
I like your attitude. Lots of companies will be willing to hire you as a developer if things don't work out.
Because living requires $
I can spend a few years getting this off the ground without substantially impacting my savings