How to Develop Products that Users Need: A Story

Hey hackers! 👋

This community has been one of my go-to resources on #IdeaValidation over the years. I wanted to share a system I’ve been working on that has enabled me to keep my finger on the pulse of the early-stage business ideas I have been working on: Protolyst.

I'm hoping that parts of this approach may be useful to pull into your personal idea validation workflows.

👂 Speaking to Users and Gathering Data

Like any good Indie Hacker, when validating a new business idea, I try to direct as much of my attention as possible into talking to potential customers and users.

What I kept finding though, particularly when managing multiple ideas in parallel, was that I struggled to accurately recall the important insights or golden nuggets from so many interactions. If I ever looked back through my notes I could almost never find the key idea I was looking for. So I started to build a system to keep track of who I was talking to, where and when I spoke to them, the notes from the conversation, and importantly to jot down the key ideas I learned from each meeting or article I read.

The problem I found was that these notes ended up everywhere! I’d open notes app, Google docs, I’d bookmark pages, or just scribble on the back of an envelope! This made the process of consolidating those ideas a huge effort. I started to use things like Zettlekasten, but found myself spending a huge amount of time in administration and organisation of the data and little time actually synthesising much from it.

💻 Trying an Indie Hack of My Own

And so (after some Idea validation of my own) I started to develop an in-house way of keeping track of these ideas, first built out of bits of hacked together script running on a SquareSpace page (the MVP). Then when clients started asking for access to it, I developed it into a standalone version that became Protolyst.

With Protolyst I tried to pioneer a knowledge-centric approach to data, rather than our traditional document-centric approaches. I’d observed that I’d very rarely take the time to find a deeply foldered document to reference an idea, usually I’d just do my best to remember it and hope I had it right.

What if instead, great ideas and insights were liberated from the confines of a page? I started to design an interconnected architecture built around your core “atoms” of data. ⚛️

Each atom can be tagged in a page with custom attributes, like market size, customer pain, or feature request. I can easily collect, collate, and sort to instantly pool evidence from across 100’s of customer conversations.

📄 My Workflow

I found that if I identified pain points accurately and captured these insights across my conversations, over time, patterns emerged that revealed the most influential problems people faced. I found three key factors to making these patterns emerge more reliably and quickly:

• Taking concise, descriptive notes and atomising these notes immediately after a call (or during it) into buying preferences, competitors products used, or pain points.
• Sharing this method across my team and being diligent with how atoms were tagged meant I always had access to the most insightful parts of their conversations even if I wasn’t present to remember it and hadn’t read their notes
• See the forest for the trees. By looking at the global pool of information about an idea, I could assess whether I was really solving a problem, or whether a particular feature actually had enough user requests to justify its implementation.

🔨Building Evidence Based Products

"Just one more feature" is an all too familiar phrase. If you’re like me, you’ve probably been guilty of creating features interesting to yourself rather than features that genuinely provide unique value to your users. Today, I make sure to use Protolyst to be able to evidence every item in my action list. Business ideas can be evidenced not just during the ideation phase, but also during the development phase.

Linking your features and ideas to evidence directly from your customer conversations before you even touch a line of code empowers you to stay true to your vision and build what you know customers will love. It helps prioritise tasks that provide the most value and avoid those “nice to haves”.

Once you have a firm understanding of what a potential solution to your users' problems may look like, start building, but then test, test and test again. Collect feedback, and connect it to refinements or additional features still required.

Use your knowledge-base to outline and develop an effective MVP that, first and foremost, evaluates your product-market fit.

No matter how thorough we are with our idea validation, the confidence to take the leap and move forward with any startup idea, stems from us, the entrepreneurs. However, I have found that this leap is much easier when I am well researched and my decision is backed by robust data.

If you're interested in trying Protolyst to manage your own knowledge-base, join the Beta! I’ve put together a template called ‘Product Management’ that you can select on sign up. I'll see you there!