How we grew our MVP from 0 → 100 users in two weeks

https://nanoai.run/, feel free to try.

First off, we came from building two failed projects over seven months and the MVP I’m writing about now grew into a full product with 2000+ users and 60+ paying customers.

So we had spent seven months building two failed projects, and now we were looking for a new project idea.

It was a confusing time of looking for ideas everywhere. We explored social media looking at what other people were building, which products were trending, looking at b2b vs b2c alternatives, etc.

Then we discovered the easier move, which was just to solve our own problem. A problem where we could really feel the pain ourselves and we desperately wanted a solution for it.

It was the problem of building products that no one wants.

So how on earth do you go about solving this?

Well, after doing a lot of research it turns out there’s actually a process that greatly increases your chance of building a successful product.

It all begins with validating your idea. Now what does this really mean?

Validating your idea simply means talking to your target audience, i.e. the people who have the problem you’re trying to solve, and finding out:

• how valuable your idea is to them

• how they currently solve the problem

• how big of a pain it is to them

• how much they would pay for a solution

I did this through a Reddit post on my target audience’s subreddit.

You should aim for about 20 responses if you want to be confident in your idea. I did not actually get that many myself so I won’t say your idea won’t work unless you get at least 20, but the response I got was overall positive so I still felt quite certain.

Now you have confirmation from real people that building your product probably won’t be a waste of your time.

If you want to be even more confident, you can set up a landing page to offer pre-orders and collect emails.

Remember that validation is a continuous process, now you’ve passed the first check. The next validation step will be once you’ve built the MVP. Then you'll see if people actually sign up for it and use it. Then when you get feedback on your idea, that’s validation. And the biggest validation, when you implement pricing, do people actually pay for it?

So make giving feedback an easy step. Here’s something we’ve learned with Buildpad, if people like your product they’ll be more than happy to provide you with feedback and even jump on calls to help you.

What if your post doesn’t get any responses? What if you receive no feedback? What if you get no attention?

Well, you should always try posting again of course. Don’t give up after one attempt. But know that this is also an indication that your product is boring/not valuable/not interesting enough. Most people won’t care to give feedback on a product that won’t help them/aren’t interesting to them.

And if you want to get responses on your post, don’t copy paste from ChatGPT. People recognize this and it’s obvious that you haven’t put any effort into creating the post, so why should they put effort into giving you feedback.

So let’s get back to our story.

Once we had gotten a positive response we built our MVP which took about 30 days.

We shared it with the same people who gave us feedback on the idea earlier and did a launch post on their subreddit. This got us our first few users.

To continue growing we posted on X and Reddit for two weeks. The X posts were in the Build in Public community where we simply talked about how the launch was going for us. We also engaged with the community members, and if people asked for help and it was relevant, we mentioned our product as a solution for them. On Reddit we did launch posts where it was allowed and also posts providing value on a topic relevant to our product so we could mention it naturally and actually help people who needed it. If your product actually solves a problem people have, most won’t mind you sharing it.

Doing this for two weeks got us 100 users, which was more than we’d ever had for any other project, so you can imagine our excitement coming from months of building and marketing our previous two projects which got pretty much no attention at all.

So this is how we grew our MVP from 0 → 100 users in two weeks.

We then went on to improve the MVP based on all the feedback, built it into a full product, and grew it to 2000+ users and 60+ paying customers.

But that’s a story for another time.

I hope our story can help some of you build your MVPs and get your first users!