Introduction and customer development question
Howdy y’all,
ABOUT ME
I’m a developer and entrepreneur working on my solo muse project.
Indie hackers has been a super valuable and important resource to me and the email newsletter is the only newsletter I always open and never think about unsubscribing.
I’ve built a couple small things in the past and had a couple failed and partially successful product launches , CatsOnDemand.com being a fun launch I did last year...
WHAT I’M WORKING ON
At this point, I’m religiously following the Lean Startup methodology, and using the Focus workbooks to help me implement it.
Last week, I interviewed 10 of my prospective customers, and this week I have some more scheduled.
I found a common emotional pain that my segment is willing to pay for, but I’m aware of an existing solution that already seems to do a better job that I could out of the gate (they have a robust product and team, I’m going to have to build an MVP as a solo dev).
I don’t have anything built yet.
MY QUESTION
If multiple potential customers are having a pain with a current paid solution, but are unaware of a better solution that my competitors offer - should I go ahead and build what they need rather or refer them to the other solution and keep looking for an unmet need?
http://abinoda.com/book/nail-it-then-scale-it
50% rule: If 50% of customers return your call, you have found the monetizable pain and a potential beachhed for your product.
IMO, if you can bring a different value position from your competitors, you should go ahead and build it. So it can be different features, lower prices, different support...
If you want to target the exact same value position, it seems hard to compete with bigger teams that already have a robust product).