How are you getting your insights for what you're going to do in your product?
Hey, Indie hackers! How are you getting your insights for what you're going to do in your product and how you'll do it?
Hey, Indie hackers! How are you getting your insights for what you're going to do in your product and how you'll do it?
I got married and had kids.
Ok, it's a bit more complicated than that, but that's really the beginning of the story. My wife is a collector, she has been since she was a kid. This naturally carried through to my daughters. I'm the financier for literally thousands of things they've collected over the years. If you've ever collected things or been close to somebody who has, there eventually gets to be a point where you can no longer keep it all straight in your head.
This starts leading to problems:
Being a software developer, my first thought was, "I can build something to fix this." This idea just kind of grew and morphed into the project I'm working on now -- a site/community where collectors of things can keep track of their stuff, share it with others, create wish lists, buy/sell, discuss, etc. An added bonus is being able to provide specific info for insurance purposes in the unfortunate event of a fire/flood/disaster/etc.
I'm hoping to use this long holiday break to get it to point were we can start bringing in beta users. Unfortunately, I don't have a landing page up even yet, but soon....
So yeah, my inspiration is years of learning all the pain points my obsessive family have dealt with in their pursuit of adding to and maintaining their ever-growing collections.
Howdy, Bill! Thanks a lot for sharing your cool story. I appreciate that!
Do you talk to prospective users and do a market analysis before you start the realization of your product idea?
We've talked to a several people who've tried other things with poor results, and want an option that works and is easy to manage. That said, I don't build a ton of things like this, so I don't have a set formula for it.
Got it. That makes sense!
Bill, what is the hardest part about building a product for you?
Hey 👋!
AFAIC, I either know the customer pain through user talks and build around that or rely on analytics tool to find out user behavior/patterns/pain and then try to work around it.
Often. I detect something not working properly in terms of business, and I dig to find out why and then build accordingly 😄
Hi, Axel!
What about talking to your user – do you conduct customer interviews? How do you do that process?
Yes I do and depends on the kind of users.
For B2B users, I love to conduct shadow interview where I watch them use the product for like 20-30 minutes and then ask why they did what they did to understand their thought process and adjust the product accordingly. It worked very well with publishers for Edith et Nous.
For B2C users, I try to prepare a survey and use analytics to find a cohort of users for which I aim to solve an issue, and then reach out to them to do 20 minutes interview to ask them about the product and their main pain points.
The cohort split is important because there is often different usage for different people and I don’t wanna miss out or degrade the experience for another cohort.
Now I get it, Axel. That makes sense.
What is the hardest part about building a product for you as a product maker?