How to find out if product has traction or not?

You can do a quick common-sense evaluation of an idea before writing any code whatsoever, just by analyzing the basics. I recommend checking that guide out, it's quite short.

After that, I recommend talking to customers, ideally 2-3 convos per week. They don't have to be any longer than 5-15 minute convos each. It's not about collecting tons of data. Rather, it's about asking the right questions, learning new things, and questioning your most important assumptions. In-person convos (or at least calls) are wayyyy better than surveys by far.

There's a great book on this by Rob Fitzpatrick called The Mom Test. Probably buy that and give it a read. It's about a 2-hour read, faster if you skim. And it will save you many hundreds of hours, I'm sure. It's very easy to talk to customers the wrong way and get bad data that leads you in the wrong direction.

I would caution against any sort of "should I build" or "should I talk to customers" dichotomy. Do both, always. If you finding that building is so time-consuming that you don't have room to talk to customers, then the scope of your product is too large and you should shrink it. Either that, or you're building inefficiently (e.g. coding from scratch instead of using templates, etc). Probably both. Regardless, a few customer convos per week is always manageable, and you should avoid making any excuses to skip imo.

Obviously, the only definitive test of traction is building something, trying your distribution strategy, and seeing what happens. So build, definitely build. And distribute, definitely distribute.

But don't neglect the theory, and don't neglect talking to customers, as they will ultimately guide you toward building the right thing and distributing the right way. Code takes forever to write, publish, and learn from. But theory and customer conversations can teach valuable insights in mere minutes that would take you months of iterating on code to discover.

Say something nice to pavelz…

3

If you can get a bare bones MVP done in 1-2 weeks then do that. Get a handful of users trying out the MVP, get feedback from them, iterate based on feedback, rinse and repeat. You will learn more from that process versus a landing page + questionnaire.

Can you be more specific on your target market? Everybody wants to stay productive and have less distractions.

Shane325

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7 years ago
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1

You can do a quick common-sense evaluation of an idea before writing any code whatsoever, just by analyzing the basics. I recommend checking that guide out, it's quite short.

After that, I recommend talking to customers, ideally 2-3 convos per week. They don't have to be any longer than 5-15 minute convos each. It's not about collecting tons of data. Rather, it's about asking the right questions, learning new things, and questioning your most important assumptions. In-person convos (or at least calls) are wayyyy better than surveys by far.

There's a great book on this by Rob Fitzpatrick called The Mom Test. Probably buy that and give it a read. It's about a 2-hour read, faster if you skim. And it will save you many hundreds of hours, I'm sure. It's very easy to talk to customers the wrong way and get bad data that leads you in the wrong direction.

I would caution against any sort of "should I build" or "should I talk to customers" dichotomy. Do both, always. If you finding that building is so time-consuming that you don't have room to talk to customers, then the scope of your product is too large and you should shrink it. Either that, or you're building inefficiently (e.g. coding from scratch instead of using templates, etc). Probably both. Regardless, a few customer convos per week is always manageable, and you should avoid making any excuses to skip imo.

Obviously, the only definitive test of traction is building something, trying your distribution strategy, and seeing what happens. So build, definitely build. And distribute, definitely distribute.

But don't neglect the theory, and don't neglect talking to customers, as they will ultimately guide you toward building the right thing and distributing the right way. Code takes forever to write, publish, and learn from. But theory and customer conversations can teach valuable insights in mere minutes that would take you months of iterating on code to discover.

csallen

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7 years ago
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