How to ask companies for their pain-points and feedback before your product launch?

Hello Indie Hackers!

I'm building a SaaS tool for web-product-based companies to gather feedback and communicate with their users.

I'm currently at the stage where I have high fidelity designs of MVP done and almost everyting else planned already in my head. (I'm a lone design/dev/founder).

And I want to reach out to companies that I think will be interested in my product to gauge that interest and get early feedback so I can build the best MVP as I can. I'm hoping it can also give me some early customers when I launch.

So - here's my question to you - how would you approach that? How would you find these companies? Which channels would you use to reach out to them (email, linkedin, etc.?)? How would you made them interested in what you're building?

I would greatly appreciate any tips you'd have about this process!

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As for the product itself which I'm building - ConveyKit.com - it's a "two way" communication tool between web-product-based companies (in future also for mobile app products) and their users.

It's aimed at solving these problems:

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1. Majority of users are often in dark about new product updates like bug fixes, changes, or new features. Either by companies not actually communicating them or just users missing the article/post/notification/whatever, because e.g. it was hidden in product blog which only most engaged/loyal users read.

ConveyKit will try to solve that by:

• Encouraging companies to write small/medium product updates often.
• Notifying users about product updates using widget seamlessly integrated into website (that tries to be as non-annoying and non-overwhelming as possible).
• Automatically and effortlessly notifying users via other channels like e.g. email. Without messing with email marketing services, templates, etc.

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1. Companies often need to trust their gut and feedback scattered across emails, chats, phone conversations, Twitter/Instagram/etc. DMs, etc. when building new features, changing stuff, etc. That results in a product build on assumptions instead of actual users needs. Which may lead to features and changes that don't add much value or no one actually want them.

ConveyKit will try to solve that by:

• Making is as easy and non-obstructive for user to leave feedback and easily find and vote/comment on feedback left by other people.
• Gauging how important the feature/bug/etc is actually for the user.
• Actively asking users questions about features/bugs/etc importance or other custom questions using non-annoying widget seamlesly integrated into website.

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1. Tracking interest/usage/opinions of launched updates/changes/features. There are a lot of analytic products that offer tracking raw usage data of that. But there aren't that many products that allow to effortflessly find out what actually users think about that new feature or change that was introduced. Sometimes a small course change of e.g. recently introduced feature may make users satisfied a lot more.

ConveyKit will try to solve that by:

• Allowing users to seamlessly leave feedback/comments on product updates.
• Again, allowing users to leave feedback as descibed in previous point 2.

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1. (Not in MVP) Communicating future of the product. There are a lot of SaaS products that allow to create product roadmaps - but majority of them are mostly for internal use. The only "good" option is Trello board, which isn't targeted at this use and it sometimes show.

ConveyKit will try to solve that by:

• Public roadmap that are tailor made for users to see what future holds and also leave feedback on that.

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As you see that's a lot of problems to solve, and there are already some good solutions on market for each of these problems. But that's where I think is the strength of ConveyKit - it solves all of these problems in a unified and single place.

As "one picture is worth a thousand words" - here are some early mockups of some of the widget integrations:
https://conveykit.com/early/widget-update-notification.png
https://conveykit.com/early/widget-update-read.png
https://conveykit.com/early/widget-feedback.png

But these images are just a small portion of what I'm planning for ConveyKit. There is a lot more to it... Like additional customization, standalone, embeddable public pages to see updates & gather feedback, admin panel to manage feedback, etc, etc...

If you think that this is something you might want to learn more about or you might want to use. Please let me know! I'd also love to hear your own pain-points or any ideas you have.

You can contact me under dominikdsgnr@gmail.com.