What is one *consistent problem* that you are facing while building your startup/product?
Hey all,
What is one consistent problem that you are facing building your startup/product in the last 6 months? Or, what is that one thing that you thought should not be that painful to do it?
I'm asking because I am looking for some real problem statements.
Customer interviews/insights is a big one
Finding customers can be hard, but connecting with them to get insights can be incredibly hard (especially when they aren't in your network)
What are you currently doing about it? Did you try setting up a call (or a meeting) with them?
We have a process that we created as founders and has been passed down to management plus interns:
We create a qualifying survey and share this 5-100 times
From the qualifying survey we pick 5-25 respondents
We interview (zoom/discord call) them using market, habit, and product focused questions
We summarize the data in airtable and turn it into charts
Thanks to airtable and google docs the process is templated out however running the process is tedious (especially the first two steps and last step)
Interesting process. Thanks for taking the time and sharing these. I'd love to dig deeper into the problem:
What's the major issue with "creating a qualifying survey"? Is it coming up with the right questions? Choosing the right audience to send the survey to? (based on their usage or non-usage of your product)?
To pick 5-25 respondents, is it about going through all the "textual" responses and then qualifying them? Does having a more "numerical" kind of response help to shortlist faster?
Is the last step about "data entry" or making meaningful charting?
I am asking because I'm really curious to learn.
Creating the qualifying survey - this is more about finding participants than the actual survey creation . As an example https://www.polywork.com/ this site has a beta testing tag fort people who are offering or need people for beta testing (reddit also has some great areas for this), but posting to all the places needed can be incredible tedious depending on how spread out your audience is
Picking respondents for interviews - This could very much be solved with an AI who could select the best fit candidate after the survey has been up for a week or two would be great. Also if the AI could help fill in additional metadata based on their email/info
For data entry - Our interview doc is a google doc so eventually someone on the team has to move the qualitative data to the more quantitative spreadsheets. We do have columns for more emotional/feels data but going through and summarizing this also takes a large amount of time.
Most tools I've found that help with the above are way pricey for indiehackers who could really use a similar system. I think ProductHunt is close but maybe having something more recruit-y?
I've come across this several times and we're currently working on a solution to build qualitative user research into the product right from the start.
We sketched it out here: formbricks.com
@vintually Would love to connect to see if we can become design partners to shape the solution out. Drop me a line at johannes@formbricks.com if you're up for a 15min chat :)
Looks interesting. Talk to you soon.
Product-market fit. I've validated my idea as a major problem for a customer segment but I don't know if the product I'm building will be the right one.
How did you go about validating the idea?
I collected a waitlist from a landing page sent to my target customer segment to give me an indication of interest and surveyed the waitlist regarding their major problems in the area. One of the major problems they identified was our focus and validated our hypothesis. We subsequently ran interviews to get more detail.
super, great to know your hypothesis is validated 🤟
I am building a product called https://create.video, we're a self-funded startup. We didn't launch yet. Also, planning to take an investment after the launch but until that time I have to pay for development.
So, the real problem is money. This is why sometimes I feel bad, but I believe everything will be okay :]
People usually take up some consulting work to cover their (+ team) costs until they raise funds or generate enough revenue.
Yes, this is what I do.
👍
For me today the biggest problem is employees. I feel like I made a lot of mistakes because of this. Not so long ago I found an article What is the True Cost of Firing an Employee? https://hr-bit.com/what-is-the-true-cost-of-firing-an-employee/ And it allowed me to look at the situation from a different perspective. And change your attitude towards your team
hiring/finding tech talent to work with!
your early-stage startup can't compete with the resources late-stage startups / big tech companies can deploy. your leverage is your mission, passion, & team!
Find developers who have already built what you're building on GitHub, & connect/partner with them through Githired: https://bit.ly/githired_swe
I guess hiring tech talent will be a forever problem.