UX research vs. just rip it and see what happens?

Hello fellow indie hackers,

I recently posed a question to the oracle of Indie Hackers:

But then I thought, why not ask here?
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You are all awesome creators with different backgrounds. While not all of us here are serving millions or making beaucoup bucks (yet), what was your starting point like (with your current/most successful product)?

Did you learn a few product discovery tricks as you went about it? Did you have some marketing/product/UX background to do discovery work? Did nothing at all?

And if you did discovery, how deep did you go?

(For example, did you know there were > 40 experiments/tests that you could run?)

I added a very unscientific poll that's surely poor form, but some data is better than none 😅