I spoke with over 120 indie hackers about how they navigate product/market fit.

I'm a trained product designer and have worked for the last 15 years on projects forming new products and services. But a few years back I started a series of conversations with indiehackers that significantly changed my approach to product design.

I have been interested in how things get created for as long as I can remember, and a few years back I started to become interested in the specific tools and approaches people use. There is something about the startup community that puts it on the forefront of new tools and approaches. So I started conversations with people from all around the world (you may have been one of the people I spoke with). I wanted to see what people do to figure out what to build.

The structure of the interviews were simple. We took a recent product or feature release that the founder had launched and we went back in the timeline and stepped through every detail from initial idea to production code. What prompted the idea? What conversations were happening? What were the challenges? What specific tools or approached were being used? The conversations went for about 30-45mins, and they were just fascinating.

I got to share with people what I was learning along the way, but I thought I could share some of the insights I learned here. So here we go:

1. Process as Product
   There were many different approaches that founders took to the challenge of product / market fit. These different approaches were often honed over time, like a product would be. Some build sophisticated methods to capture ideas in lists and prioritise them based on various attributes, but other equally decided not to capture anything but trusted that repeating requests would form over time to determine what to build. Each process was honed to fit the type of approach the founder felt fit them and how they wanted to operate.

2. Humility
   No one I spoke to thought that they had nailed this challenge of product / market fit, no matter how high their revenue, or honed their process. I tend to now put this down to the nature of the product / market fit challenge. It is full of unknowns, and even it you crack it and start to get the kind of traction described by the y combinator crew, or folk like Rahul Vohra of superhuman, you have more features or products to build, and more fit to find. The key thing here is that founders may not need to view their lack of confidence in this area as a sign that they aren't doing a good approach.

3. Curiosity & Focus
   The activities that founders were involved in with product / market fit often opened the door to a lot of information to make sense of. Founders had different ways of navigating this. Some would put up 'feature voting' pages to help to order the feedback somewhat. In the early, early days founders would engage with anyone who had an interest in their product. But the balance soon needed to be struck between the openness of understanding the needs of people, and the focus of honing what exactly needed to be built.

4. Custom Tools
   I found that a lot of founders used pretty simple tools to manage the product / market fit challenge. Often it was simply Apple Notes, Notion, Google Sheets, Physical Notebooks, and task apps like Asana or Trello. Depending on the setup, some founders would have a mix of some specialist tools like Feature Voting boards, and their own task/note apps. There have also been a range of new types of tools come into the market to help to sort the feedback from customer, now using language models to handle things at scale. The key thing here is that there were lots of different setups, and it seemed to me to be mostly down to the specific preferences of the founder and the type engagements they wanted to have with customers. This had a range of contextual factors, for example some folk just couldn't interact with users just anytime of the day due to family or work commitments. So they would set the way they engaged with their users through things like email, or a public roadmap.

There were a range of other things I discovered along the way, so feel free to ask any questions in the comments. I guess the overall message I'd probably leave you with is that there are a number of ways you could approach this challenge, and there were successful founders with lots of different ways of doing things. You may not feel confident in how you are approaching product / market fit, but that seems pretty normal.

In terms of some practical ideas to consider. Here are some different setups founders have:

1. Setup a Slack group for general support then make specific channels to invite users into to discuss new features

2. Send an email to new users, or a sample of new users after they have spent an amount of time on your product where you think they would have experienced the key value, and ask them to walk through with you their experience of the challenge your app helps them with, and why/how they switched to your product.

3. Use something like Notion, Evernote, or even just Apple Notes to record your reflections on the feedback coming and what the patterns could be. I actually ended up building a note app in this area [https://hunch.tech] as I became so interested in the role of intuition in some of the ways founders make these product decisions.

4. User scraps of paper by your laptop to form your thoughts, and trust that if something needs to be built, then the feedback will keep coming on that issue. This approach also helps clear your head, as some founders just like to approach problems with a fresh page and don't like the feel of a long list they need to get to, but will never have time to.

5. Use a more sophisticated research tool like Dovetail.com to structure quotes from customers and explore insights. Some founders had a workflow where they would use different dedicated tools to identify patterns, then feed them into the next tool for refining before they were broken down into tasks to work on.

I hope you find the approach that fits you, or even a combination of some of these things. Remember that this is a very challenging area that seems to just take a commitment to over a long time, so find your approach and hone it to fit the type of way that works for you.

Hope this helps.