Product-market fit is driving me crazy.
Do we have it?
Do we not?
Is it this hard for everybody?
The question's always in my brain, somewhere, all day. I'm awake at night thinking about it.
Recently had the first sales call for my startup nonfik. (ahem, free ebook library for professionals to discover, collect, discuss.) And there was the "aha!" moment as I was pitching, where I could see on his face that the idea had clicked.
He went from "OK, I guess so" to excited and interested in adding his book to the platform.
And it felt so validating!
Like, OK! First legit call and we're making progress. Listing is free, but we'll get him some engaged leads and then we'll have a sale on our hands. It's been such a trial to get anyone on a call.
But now getting people to comment & engage is also like pulling teeth.
Honestly, Indie Hackers, this is a real cry for help: if you could, sign up and try leaving a comment on this book. What do you think?
Feel free to stay and take a look around, or you can delete the account. But has anybody out there found good PM-fit after having to fight for it in the beginning?
Hi mekkie, I clicked on your post because I am in the midst of customer discovery right now and it is definitely very difficult. I am trying to stay true to the advice of not to spend too much time coding/building until I have talked to enough people to be confident that there is product market fit. Finding that many people to interview - without a product to demo - is daunting. So I sympathize with what you wrote.
Regarding nonfik. I signed up and checked out the PDF that you linked to. Before doing that, I checked out your landing page - and honestly I couldn’t quite figure out what you were offering until I actually logged on to the app (that "aha!" moment). Though I did enjoy the video (with the Brady Bunch montage at the end - entertaining).
Once I got into nonfik, I understood things a little better. I definitely think there is a glut of “free” PDFs online these days. It seems like every time I log onto Twitter or LinkedIn someone is posting a new “how to” guide or something. So I can appreciate the appeal of being able to go to a place to find vetted Free PDFs / Books. If I’m understanding your problem/solution correctly.
I really like the community notes feature - like Goodreads but for free PDFs/Books. I guess my initial question is still - how do I know these PDFs are legit and actually meaningful. I think I would need some “influencers” or curators to help with that initial guidance.
The specific PDF that you linked to (“What is the Remote Employee Experience”) was a little too long to keep my interest. And, frankly, I don’t know how the framework that they suggest would be different for remote or in-person employees. I haven’t left a comment yet for the book because I’d prefer to leave a positive comment - for your customer to appreciate.
Keep it up, it sounds like you are doing the right thing (talking to customers)! Best of luck!
This is great feedback. Thank you! Already working on adding some info about our vetting process to the homepage. Glad you got a laugh out of the video though!
I signed up to nonfik. I'm an avid reader myself, a couple of points:
pdf is no longer a good reading experience. I prefer Kindle / Audiobook. Maybe adding an integration to send this book to the user's Kindle and syncing Kindle's notes with your site be helpful. Not sure if Kindle provides APIs for it but I have seen some sites show your highlighted passages and then you can get the user to comment on your site.
Whenever I pick-up a new book, I see it's cover(both front and back) to get a gist of what to expect from the book. The image thumbnail is not clickable, so I have to first 'Add the book' to my shelf before I can even see it's cover properly. Saw this option in homepage where one can explore books by category, but would like it in the 'All Books' option as well.
The best social site of books that I know of is Goodreads. I use Goodreads to explore new titles, based on my friends recommendations and reading lists. I love the logo and the concept of nonfik, but I think you need to work a bit more on what people are expecting to get after engaging with it. One thing I would try if I were in your position is to write a short summary of one book a day, leave it on IH/Twitter/Medium with the link to the book and get more feedback from people. If possible, I would also recommend sending the same summary to the signed up users, so that they get something of value before deciding whether they should engage with the book.
This is such great feedback. Thank you! We're working on integrating text-to-speech right now but haven't found a good no-code way to do it consistently (especially on books that have text saved as images. Same with the kindle API (if it's at all interesting you can see our public roadmap here: https://www.notion.so/nonfik/Nonfik-Public-Roadmap-fb8b77c014b2414a900b6c5e45197cc5)
Could you tell me more about how it would be useful to have this clickable thumbnail in the all books page? we have book preview images on all listing pages, but I'd love to get a better sense of how you navigated to the book you added and how this would have helped. Our initial hypothesis was that everyone would enter from a page like this (https://www.nonfik.com/ebook-listing/the-product-experience-playbook) and then add the books that were relevant. But maybe browsing for books is a more prominent use case?
I love love love this idea. One thing I would try if I were in your position is to write a short summary of one book a day, leave it on IH/Twitter/Medium with the link to the book and get more feedback from people. -- THANK YOU!!
I wanted to browse all titles so I went to this link: https://app.nonfik.com/bookshelf/nonfik-app from the 'all books' option on the top. The image thumbnails are there but they are very small. I intuitively tried clicking on the thumbnail to make it larger, but that feature is not there. If I could somehow see the details of this link: https://www.nonfik.com/ebook-listing/the-product-experience-playbook in the 'All Books' page or be able to click somewhere to open this link from the All Books page, it would be super helpful. Currently, I had to Add to Shelf, to be able to get any info about the book.
Are you building using no-code tools? I am working on a platform to allow people to add 3rd party integrations very easily. The MVP launch is on April 1. If you are willing to try out our platform (for free of course), I can ask my team to look into adding Kindle integration to our list of supported integrations.
Ah, we could definitely try to add that! I'll have to think of how to do it though and yeah! We built the app side on bubble and the pre-login side on webflow. Would love to see your product!
Great, let us try adding the Kindle integration. If we are successful in doing so, I'll reach back to you.
Ok! Can't wait to hear :)
Did you run ads on FB first to get interested people to sign up? What about running them to a sales page where they can sign up and pay, (but not accept payment) so you can test if the Value Prop is on target? If you already built the thing without validating this first you risk a huge amount of wasted effort!