Promote Before Building
I'm new here, but I've noticed that many milestones and posts on IH sound like a massive uphill battle to gather just a few signups.
Why is this?
It seems like traditional advice would be to make sure you have proper product/market fit AND the ability to personally reach your market BEFORE grinding away building something for 2+ months.
Thoughts on this? Would love to hear advocates for "Build it and they will come" as well as "Test first, build next"
I think that what @levidxyz mirrors my experience.
It's kind of hard to approach customers without at least a deck or a mini product or something... you just don't have a lot of credibility.
I suppose you can ask more general questions -> sort of - 'how have you solved XYZ problem before' just to get a conversation going, but then you end up having to follow back up with them... 'hey I built something' later.
In my opinion, there are only a few places where you can get sales before building.
You should mainly be focused on only 5-10 customers you can interact with and figure out how your product adds value for them. Not only will you be able to build your product based on their feedback, they may refer their friends.
With that being said, let me know if you or anyone you know is interested in monitoring front-end performance: https://pagecheck.app
(I'm still looking for those initial 5-10 customers and I probably built too much too early.)
Hey, thanks for the thoughtful response. You've got a great point. Those seem to be the most straightforward forms of pre-sales.
Getting email addresses is another form of testing though - no sales involved. I think there is more room for testing that way than merely pre-sales, right?
Personally, I haven't tried that, but I'm guessing that works best with services that require more customization.
It doesn't hurt to send a hundred emails and see what kind of responses you get though.
Classic Lean startup: Build. Measure. Learn.
It's nice to start a little teaser before your launch.
Why?
Hence, I would go for Test first, build next model @trentguillory
People say get presales/commitment before building, but most of the time that's very unrealistic, especially for 1) solo, 2) bootstrapped, 3) first-time, 4) indie hackers, with 5) little to no connections. You can also do customer development beforehand, ascertain the problem before building it, and then start building it. Still your prospects' needs might have changed over the time you take to build your product, or they don't like your solution to their problem, or the problem just isn't big enough to pay for or actively solve, which you can only really discover when you finally ask people to put their money where their mouths are.
So ultimately it still boils down to your entrepreneurial instinct, your business acumen. Do you think this is something that people want to pay for? Can you reach these people? Can you outcompete the incumbents? Do you like working on this idea? Have you any prior experience or knowledge with this specific niche? Do you have the technical know-how to build it/can you acquire it?
Of course you should still validate your idea, but at the end of the day it's still more art than science. In fact, I'd say validating that you have a go-to-market route is way more important than validating the idea itself. You'll understand why when you try to reach/access your prospects.