I made the cardinal mistake of building something before marketing it. Now what.

I wouldn't go straight toward launching it. Instead take a step back and evaluate things. What's the problem you think your app solves? Who has this problem, specifically? Do they actually care about this problem? If so, what are they already doing and spending to solve it? Is it a problem worth solving, i.e. is it frequent, important, common, lucrative, etc.?

Do some research, then go out and talk to people. While you're at it, pay attention to the channels you use to find them, because those are the channels you're going to market through later.

If you're lucky, you've already built something that solves a great problem for a solid group of people. But more likely than not, you'll need to make some significant tweaks. That's okay, though, because these tweaks will at least be informed by a deeper understanding of the problem.

My two cents: If you pivot. Don't get stuck in a local maxima. The next problem you solve doesn't have to be related to this one. Time costs the same. But we are often tricked by sunk costs. And trying to recycle code or insights.

Looking at your profile, it looks like you made https://capable.app/ and it definitely sounds like something that could be useful! I think if we had an app that needed much more in-depth info on the browser environment, we'd definitely install this.

It's marketing mode time!!

Building something with out knowing who the market is, isn't by itself a bad thing. It's just not ideal, you have to take off that hard hat now though the building is done, you have a prototype.

Start marketing it, build out some marketing plans and start trying to find some users, look for different niches that might be interested. You have an advantage though, you have a working product so as you go into those niches you can give away extended trials and test the markets.

Bring in that feedback and see what the market says before deciding on how your product will evolve and what your next features should be.

Best of luck with it!

It's built. Find your first customer. Reach out & discuss. Find who has the problem. Offer your solution. If no bites then your discussions will help you decide your next step. Best of luck.

Try to find your first customer. Talk to people, do some research. See if what you have built is something people will pay for.

And share the product here on IH, maybe we can help you find your first customer or give you more specific ideas on who to reach out to.

So, I'm a developer working in a small team that has a single overworked QA member (pretty standard I've found, sadly), and I was considering this for his use but I have some questions. He already uses a screen recording app to create a video of the steps taken and then includes that in the JIRA ticket. Does this also create a video recording? How would it provide an improvement over his current process?

The main downside of building something before validating it is simply that it could turn out to be a waste of time. On the other hand, now that you've actually built it, you're still in a good position to start validating it anyway.

More importantly though, you're probably nowhere near as finished as you think you are. There's pretty good chance that even after you find your first customer they:

• probably won't understand it
• know how to use it
• or even know that they need it
• it might not even solve their core problem as well as you think it does

That's okay though, this is why you talk to people and get lots of feedback.

I'd recommend just starting small. Post the landing page here on indie hackers and see if people understand what problem it solves. Then maybe find where your actual customers might be and show them what you've built (just be careful if you join a new forum that your not that guy that posts something spammy).

Even if you can find one single real customer that has the problem you're trying to solve the conversation you have with them should be very enlightening.

Here's how my thought process worked as I looked at your site.

First sentence had the word debugging. Awesome. My life has been about debugging for the past 30 years . Very relevant for me.

Scroll down. Create beautiful reports. Huh. What? Reports of what? Am I debugging c programs, websites, UI? Confused. Perhaps my confusion will be cleared down the line.

Nope. Exit.

My suggestion would be to improve your copy.

Here's a tip - add a demo or a screenshot or something that shows off the core value prop of your product on the landing page. When I added 'sample deals' to the landing page of Tripfate (https://TripFate.com), the conversion rate pretty much doubled. Good luck!

Building something w/out marketing it first is not such a drag, however if you did not validate it either then that could be a problem since you do not now if you solve a problem for someone. If marketing is your concern then do it at this stage using social means like this board and be aware that you might need to tweak a little based on feedback. best of luck.

How much time have you spent on building this?
Have you learned something new? (Obviously, you did)
What if now you start to find the audience and pivot the idea accordingly?

Validate it now. If it fails validation, take what you learned from potential customers and pivot. If the pivot leads you somewhere you can reuse the code fine, if you have to start again from scratch do not fall for the sunk cost fallacy. You should be willing to throw away all the code and start again with proper validation.

For validation, I recommend The Mom Test

I'd focus on refining your positioning to help people understand what it is, and who it's for. Do some customer interviews to find out who your ideal customer. Focus on understanding. It's time to switch to your marketing / customer development / sales hat, and put your dev hat away for a little while.

It's not the end of the world. Don't think backward. Having a product is easier to market than talking hypothetically about your vision. It's an advantage now. Should you start by marketing first? Yes. But play your best card now, instead of wishing you have done something different back then.

Set a small goal: talk to 5 - 10 people who are in your target audience. Interview them by having them use your product and tell you what messaging is confusing.

The only downside of "build first, market second" is you may find that some features you personally liked may not be that important to others, and other features that you think are stupid turns out to be requested by people over and over. As long as you are willing to accept those feedback and make product changes, you can turn around the situation. It's never too late! Good luck!

I think there is more than one way to succeed at this. Validating and then building is the tried and true path but not the only path. Whats your ideal outcome?

I think Intercom shows browser and OS of active users - or maybe this is just for logged in users?

You learn these things as you go, it's very difficult to get right first time unless you've sat down and planned it, or had someone with more experience go through it with you.

I've done a similar thing - I wanted to get some users first to try the product and see if any one used it before really thinking about marketing, other than planning to try some paid ads and product sites. But I now realise that planning the marketing channels and a more targeted audience should have been part of the thinking before building the product.

On a positive note, you've learned something valuable 👍

jj