When to Start Building? Thought vs Action
Hi everyone,
I'm an IndieFounder who created a lead generation tool for businesses that sell in-person as well as online. The goal is to help users collect leads from in-person events such as farmers markets and shows. This is my first serious endeavor and it's made me really question my approach to entrepreneurship. For reference, I work as a product manager as my day job.
At what point is it good to start building? Coming from a UX background, I was always taught to conduct serious user research before building out a product. This means talking to many users, understanding their problems, prototyping the product, and really validating whether you have something good. This seems all fine and dandy but the difficult part is getting access to people. Oftentimes it's difficult to get a hold of potential users in the space and be able to partner with them to test out the product. Also, there are so many different personas that it's hard to interview users till you find your exact target customer persona.
That brings me to ask is it better to build something if you have a vague conception that it might work and launch a really rough prototype before doing all the research to validate the idea? For example, if you have an email marketing tool and you have a vague idea that this might be a problem, is it better to build something out and see if it sticks? I know this violates a lot of principles, but sometimes I feel you can only learn by doing. When you build something and try to sell it, it's only then that you can get access to the people you need and really learn about the space.
What are all your thoughts?
My quick thoughts:
Some pointers that I frequently talk in our Micro SaaS HQ community and Newsletters.
You can try to run some customer interviews first. Identify their painpoints. Then present them with the idea and a workable prototype (can be just a wireframe with interactions).
Honestly I feel the hardest thing in every business is actually starting into put paper into action. What’s the true challenge is that you don’t know where to start, so I would suggest to prepare yourself. How you might ask? Research what other business did to start and go from there, that’s what I did and even if your business has a similar structure as others, you can say “ Imitation is the Sincerest Form of Flattery”
Hope this helps you on your journey!
Cheers!