Places to validate your idea and get early users
Hello 👋 I am putting together a checklist of places to validate your startup and get early users. There are quite a few of these lists. The problem I've had is they are out of date, and most of the entries are time-wasters. So I'm aiming for quality > quantity on this one.
Here's what I have so far. What am I'm missing? I'm thinking I'll turn this into a piece of content and checklist template on Taskable.
😻 Product Hunt
The big show. Post here when you are ready for a big crowd. If you have a strong product that is also a good fit for the audience here, then it can be a huge source of traffic and signups for you.
🚢 Product Hunt Ship This is Product Hunt's pre-launch feature. You can create an upcoming page, and start to build an audience here. On the paid plan they'll feature you on the Upcoming section which can bring you a lot of leads. In some cases, we've got 200 in a month for a product we were launching. However, beware as many of these leads aren't that engaged, or are spam.
🗃 Betalist
If you have a strong product, and it is a good fit with the Betalist then this can be a good source of traffic.
Keep in mind once you submit here they put you in a queue for several weeks before posting you. You can pay to skip the queue ($129) or just plan ahead!
🤠 Pioneer
Pioneer is a virtual accelerator. It starts by joining a tournament where you post weekly updates and compete against other startups to get to the top of the leaderboard. If you make the top 50 globally you are eligible to be accepted into the accelerator program.
It is a great place to get feedback, as well as meet some of your early users. It is also a commitment to post and judge updates every week.
pioneer.app
👽 Reddit
Reddit is a great place to connect with a wide variety of users. You can focus in on the startup and tech communities, and expand out towards other communities where your target users might hang out.
Like all communities, make sure you are there to add value, not just promote yourself. The best communities to go to are r/startup, r/Entrepreneur, r/SideProject, and r/BetaTestersNeeded are all good places to start.
👩🚀 Indie Hackers
This is a great community for anyone staring a digital business to hang out. Tons of great feedback and insights are shared on a daily basis, and the community is well moderated and very positive. People there generally want to help out. Share your ideas, get feedback, and you might also find your early adopters.
🎓 Startup School
Y Combinator's Startup School is exactly what it sounds like - a place to learn to build a startup. Coupled with some great content on things like talking to users, to goal setting and prioritization, you also get access to a forum and weekly calls with other founders who you can bounce ideas off of, and some might turn out to be early adopters. In addition, lots of offshoots on WhatsApp, Slack, Discord and Telegram pop up from the SUS cohort that you can join and connect with more people. Highly recommend!
🐦 Twitter
This might sound obvious, but Twitter is a great place. But make sure you use it correctly. Don't just pump out blogs and between interesting news items. Instead, use it to follow people in your industry, engage with them, ask them questions, and share insights.
💼 LinkedIn
Try not to be spammy, but follow and engage with people in your sector. As with all communities, be helpful first and more good comes of it than overtly promoting your product.
🚀 This Week in Startups Slack
A great community of founders. Get involved in conversations here, and add value. Make sure you set your username to include a url to your website and people will find your product.
launchevents.typeform.com/to/kLq5Bi
👨💻 Hacker News
The community at Hacker News is never afraid to share their opinions. Post your product/startup on Show HN and prepare for feedback.
https://github.com/mmccaff/PlacesToPostYourStartup
A little more comprehensive list
Yeah I had been working my way down that list and found it super frustrating at the variable quality of the listings.
Thanks
What if your startup isn't aimed at the people who look at these types of sites? It feels like "validation" would require getting in front of people who might be actual customers, but all these sites seem targeted at people kinda like us. I've actually been curious about this for a while, but is it possible most indie hackers are building things for other indie hackers?
Yeah totally agree - would love to expand this out for people building products for people not like us. I might comb through some of those 'how startup x for their first 100 users' articles and see if I can glean where some of those places are.
If I had the time, I'd build a website where makers could search by "persona type" and find a list of places, volunteers, forums, etc. where those types of potential users hang out. I have too many other things going on to do it, so if someone wants to build it, I'll only ask for 80% of your future revenue ;)
Yeah, I was thinking something along those lines as well.
That revenue share seems fair 👍
I hope all these lists help. :)
https://sizle.io/how-to-maximise-traffic-to-a-bootstrapped-product-hunt-launch/
https://github.com/dehenne/awesome-visibility
https://www.mypresences.com/services/startup/united-states/
http://nerdrobot.co/traffic-list
https://www.eggradients.com/startup-directory
https://submit.co/
https://www.placestopostyourstartup.com/
You forgot to mention Quora:)
Ah yeah - good one! Will add it
Great question, it will help everyone
This is very useful, thank you Matt!
Thank you for sharing the list. It is really helpful.
I tried to build something for that purpose (it didn’t succeed yet )
Https://land-ified.com
I guess it similar to the product hunt ship feature though
I like your product! Is there any way to see some examples from people who already created their landing page with your website?
Each post leads to a landing page (click on the title)
However, I still didn’t implement a custom domain for each landing page.
Thanks for your feedback
This comment was deleted 4 years ago.