If "Build and they will come" doesn't work what about "build it and find them"?
Its 2020, we all know that you don't build something and magically hope for people to find your product. We have to work hard to get our product in front of customers
One tactic is the community first / audience first approach where you build a "community" for your upcoming product and iterate with that community to make it better. From my understanding this works very well when all your customers hangout in one place. For example creativity markets such as developers , designers , social media, marketing benefit very well from this model.
But what about everything else? I don't believe every industry has a place where people hangout. I might be doing this the wrong way but I think sometimes if you search hard enough and find a problem people have and want to solve it, you have to grind to find customers, trying everything from posting on Reddit, Hackernews, scrape Twitter for people ask for a product like yours and possibly, ask people on the street (please don't do that during Corona times people)
to get a customer. It literally feels like you have to find your first customers one at a time to get some traction.
Anybody else feels the same way or had any success with this ?
40 open-source gems to replace your SaaS subscriptions 🔥 🚀
After 19,314 lines of code, i'm shutting down my project
Need feedback for my product.
We are live on Product Hunt
Don't be a Jerk. Use this Tip Calculator.
Everyone will tell you to
find then buildeven when that's not the way they did it.Twitter built first. Pinterest built first. Facebook built first. Google built first.
But they are all miracles and little old indie you will have to
find firstbecause that's the idealised way that grown-ups espouse.Imo
build then findis fine so long as build is constrained to time/effort/money you're prepared to squander down the drain when you can't find anyone.Like limiting yourself on how much you bet on a horse.
as someone who consistently "build first then scratch my head thinking where to find user", i think the advice of "find then build" does increase my chance of survival.
in the case of twitter, they had some initial users from Odeo that they could leverage. in the case of facebook, he downloaded all the emails from harvard so he knows where to find the first users.
The advice of "find then build" is not bullet-proof and I personally "violate" it all the time, but it's important to know WHY it doesn't apply to one's ideas.
For me, the WHY is simple, I enjoying building so I'll just start to build and see if I like solving the problem. But I know I am procrastinating by coding when I should validate the idea first. And I've wasted a lot of time.
If we spend aeons building something for someone we don't know how to find then yep it ain't gonna take-off. But build first where build is short and experiment with users early can/has. I'm assuming Odeo employees weren't canvassed on their thoughts before being given a V0.1 to play with. Likewise Facebook. Regardless you need to get multiple plates spinning and you need to start with one. I think it's 1000x more difficult if you work alone; have you considered partnering up?
Yeah, that's why it's hard. Or everyone would be successful by now.
I agree that work alone is difficult. But I did get help from a lot of people, just not full time or with a partner role.
I've found it's MORE difficult to find a great partner/cofounder. Not that I think others are not as good as I am, but the kind of relationship that can work out is harder to find than finding someone to marry. You need:
I've partnered with my friends before but because of the lack of alignment, the ventures didn't get far.
From what I've seen in my friends' startups, what worked were either 2 equally strong founders or 1 main founder who did 80% of the heavy-lifting and a cofounder who is a loyal follower of the main founder.
Build first or validate first, solo or partner up, we as founders need to do everything it takes to get the business off the ground and work with what we have.
That's exactly what I was trying to say ☝️. I guess I'm not crazy
You're gonna have to go out and find where your customers are either way - so you're really just delaying the inevitable and making it harder to earn the trust of someone who might buy from you because the only reason you're talking to them is b/c you have something to sell them.
That said, when you DO choose to build something and go find customers, it's really just a numbers game. Do you have enough time, money, and motivation to keep doing it long enough to get it right? That's basically the VC model, which borrows time and motivation from you, and money from someone else.
But whether or not you have someone else's money, the odds that you run out of time, money, or motivation before you make that sale goes way up when you start with a product and then go looking for customers.
It also means you're working without the key advantage of knowing how to communicate the product in a way that matches with who you're communicating with.
You're also dealing with sunk cost biases that creep in. When I'm talking to a founder who has something launched but hasn't been able to get consistent sales in spite of trying hard, the first question I ask is:
8x out of 10 they say "I don't know, I have to think about it" which roughly translates to "I've got too much time invested in this other thing, I'm not ready to let it go."
That hurts to hear, but I also know I can't help them until they really want to help themselves.
When this is the cycle:
Most folks get stuck in an endless loop of steps 1-3 since they launch and...don't know where to find customers.
Steps 4-6 can appear systematic, but most of the time, it ends up looking a lot more like flailing around by "testing things" and hoping one of them sticks.
So it all goes back to the beginning: if you can't identify who you're serving _before you build a product, it's not going to get any easier to do it after.
I hear this all the time. If you can't find a professional audience with earnest effort put into these techniques email me your audience and I'll bet that I can find at least one viable source. $100 donation to a charity of your choice if I can't. 😃
Alex, this is a great and accurate (in my opinion) description. Thank you!
My only follow up question would be how to know when you have a viable product that just needs more time to grow. There have been very successful products that didn't take off until year 2,3,etc...
Assuming you've got some validated learning from customers that want your product or are actively participating in a market very similar to your product, are there concrete ways to know if your product/idea isn't going to work versus if it just needs more runway (time, money, motivation)?
Those "success" stories are just confirmation bias. For every example of a very successful product that didn't take off until year 2 or 3, there are far more than never took off.
Meanwhile, it's far more common for success stories that appear to "take off" in year three to actually have started with much smaller wins in the first few months, and then built those small wins up to bigger ones which is what everyone outside sees when that 3rd year product "takes off."
The difference isn't the amount of time, though. It's actually figuring out how to communicate with your audience, and persuade them that your product solves THEIR problem. Retrofitting that is 100x harder even with the best techniques and tools.
That's why it's so valuable to figure that out out first, and to build smaller things that you can ship faster. Those early wins are the key in three ways:
1 - they earn you the trust of your audience. marketing funnels don't start with a blog post and end with a purchase. they continue with additional purchases. a customer who bought from you once and is happy with what you sold them is MUCH more likely to buy again when you offer additional products and services that are even more valuable. tiny products earn you more trust.
2 - you get practice talking to your audience in the language of sales. this is a major pain point for most creative and maker-y type folks, and a large % of the Indie Hackers community. sales and marketing copywriting is like anything else: you will suck at it at first, but you WILL get better with practice. tiny products help you get in more reps.
2 - they give you money! selling small products to a specific and focused audience may not be enough to replace your entire income, but it's enough to prove to yourself that you can do it again. you gain confidence in parallel with them gaining trust in you.
it also opens the door for you to take one fewer contracting client, or negotiate a 4 day work week with your employer, and use that 5th day to focus on the product business.
More on that progression here: https://stackingthebricks.com/startup-escape-plan-free-up-time-energy-money-to-invest/
Thanks Alex, I will read that article and try the techniques they talk about. 🙏
🙌
This comment was deleted 5 years ago.
I think this would work better if you switched it to "find them, and then build".
or even find them and build it :D
Well, I must admit that my product was pretty much the second case ("build it and find them") - sort of.
I used my 20+ years of experience installing payroll and accounting systems for hundreds of small businesses, and collected all the feedback I had heard customers voice about what they wanted in an HR management system, then sat down and wrote a cloud based HR SaaS based on that exact feedback.
Then, I went out in search of customers who would buy.
Granted, it was a little tricky doing it this way, as the initial places I went to in order to find customers (i.e. HackerNews, BetaList, even Indie Hackers) all gave me great vanity feedback, but no actual paying customers.
It was only when we started to go to where our customers hang out (i.e. LinkedIn, Capterra, G2 Crowd etc.) that we started to find people who would (and were ready to) buy.
Then it was a case of just tweaking what we had to refine features and improve workflow, as well as improving our messaging to customers, and now we enjoy a lot of success with getting new customers to our SaaS.
Its awesome that you guys pulled out off. So basically what you guys saw a gap that needs to filled in the HR space, built the product and promoted in the usual places. But because those were not where your customers hangout you had "niche down" where you were looking for.
Thanks for sharing your. Experience :)
Do you think you'd have the same success if you tried finding them first then build?
Thanks! Well, in a sense, we had "found" our target market purely by my 20 odd years of talking to small business owners during my consulting and implementation work.
They probably weren't a good fit for a cloud HR system though, because they were still 'old school' businesses who were built around 'on premise' software, which is why we went out to seek new customers all over the world once I had built the cloud platform.
We did convert a few of my old customers, but really, I wanted to take that learning over 2 decades and then apply the results to a whole new group of customers. Just had to go and find out where the 'new' customers hung out, which took me a couple of years! :)
It works, but it is far riskier and troublesome.
I had an 8% stake in a company that sold SaaS to big enterprises and we took this approach. We built a satellite imagery processing pipeline and tried to find what we could solve with it.
We were extremely lucky to find a champion inside one public company - public as in available in the public stock market - that helped us find a nice problem to solve for the company he was working for. I'd like to emphasize the extremely lucky part.
We wandered for six months, found this small startups program at this company and something clicked in this guy that he just liked our company, even though all we had was a pitch, an insanely capable technical founder, some satellite images and that's it.
It looks like it was successful and you should go for it. I highly recommend that you don't. The gotchas here:
Roughly 300k USD in cash, 100k USD in AWS credits, 4 founders - none of which were getting payment - and me - at roughly 540$ USD per month - and we were ultra scrappy and low cost. Our costs were energy, rent, internet and food. Basically it would be about 3k USD per month or so - at most.
This is where the survivorship bias comes into play. I'm narrating an incomplete success story. We were the Wandering Solution in Search of a Problem. Trying to fit our solution to any problem people might have. We thought a lot about pivoting to problems we found along the way - such as analyzing paint finish in cars with computer vision.
It would have been much easier if we just had followed customer development, found a relevant problem - as in I want to solve this problem, I can get paid for solving this problem and I can solve this problem - and tried to find the solution. Hence, all the risk might be concentrated in the product, rather than the market or the customers.
I tell you this because in the meanwhile we had a major contract with a huge pulp & paper producer in Brazil and they tore a signed contract in front of us. We tried contacting people at other major players trying to sell this bizarre solution and they stalled us for the very same 6 months that it took us to join that program. We were a bunch of technical geeks and had no expertise in sales - we didn't know that not meeting their bosses means a "no, you suck".
It hurt a lot at the time. It will hurt you too if you try this. Do not try this. There are far easier ways of getting the same results, in far less time, with fewer resources and little to no pain - except the pains to your ego, which can be pretty manageable.
I highly recommend that anyone read or listen to The Mom Test book/audiobook. It is amazing and might help you get your customer development machine working.
This being said, I'll repeat my point: It works, but it is far riskier and troublesome.
Wow thank you for this amazing story. It does sound like you guys were lucky. I also recently got the mom test ebook, didn't read yet but will now. Thank you for all the knowledge you shared!
It's a short read and highly recommend for anyone needing to question customers.
For me, it's more like " Build little, then find. Then keep building and keep finding".
I think in some markets its not that easy to figure out who your audience actually is. So going out and trying to find customers might give you the wrong signals. If you build something first (MVP! and it should scratch your own itch), write about it, try to get it in front of people, then your audience will filter out itself and you get an idea who to go after.
That's one way and just my opinion. On the other hand, there are products where its really easy to figure out who the audience is like a tool or ebook or something for Swift Developers.
Thanks for your ideas, I wanted to try writing about making the product but people don't actually care how it was made. Unless they are developers or other entrepreneurs. I also think about starting a blog for the app itself where I post "mini tutorials" showing how the app solves the problems it's tackling
I am interpreting the advice a little bit differently. I do always "build it [and they will come / and find them]", never "find them, and then build". However, when someone else would evaluate what I am doing, they might just think I am doing "find them, and then build".
That's because my "building" is very broad. When I build my first version, I don't really build a product. I am always trying to match the level of my product sophistication with user anticipation. (this sentence is bold for a reason. It's the most important advice in this comment IMHO)
I'll do the bare minimum, and sometimes even just create screenshots without any functionality, and write some quite sophisticated text to explain what the product is about (often more sophisticated than the screenshots).
But of course, creating those screenshots and writing those texts may not feel like "building first" for either my customers or anyone observing what I am doing, but for me it is. I need to show my users something to work with them. It doesn't have to be a full-fledged, half-fledged, or even functional app of any kind.
But I need to "build" first because I need a way to communicate to people what my product is.
I understand your frustration. Actually, that exactly why I built my side-project.
I trying to improve the process of idea validation in order to save time and money.
I just submitted a new post on my side-project and I would love it if you can check it out and share your thoughts.
I'm not trying to self promote... I sharing it here because I believe it's related and can help you and others =)
Link to the post: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/a-new-way-to-validate-your-idea-2940b0b4f4
Link to the Web App: https://land-ified.com
Naveh.