Ask HN: How do I know if I'm building something only myself find useful? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do I know if I'm building something only myself find useful?

9 pointsshanwang15 comments

I have this "organic" idea that myself find very useful. But I have shared my idea with a number of friends who I think can be my target users, but most of them are not thrilled, how do I know if I'm building something only useful to myself but not a group of people like me?

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"How do I know.."

Short answer: You don't know. There is no shortcut. But if you want to give it a shot, you have to go all the way:

1. Build it for yourself.

2. Start using it for yourself.

3. After a fairly stable release for yourself, start putting it out there for others to try.

4. Work on marketing it (Hardest step. Most people give up at this step). For marketing, learn how to do "inbound" marketing vs "outbound" marketing.

5. Get a professional looking website, let clients signup for a trial. Talk to them on the phone. From this step on, it is hopefully no longer a pet project.

6. Provide support to customers and take their feedback for improvements.

7. Keep making changes to the app based on client feedback. Rinse repeat

There is no fixed timeline to try this out. Depends on your market and

0. Talk to people and potencial customers about it.

but it may not be step 0 necessarily in this particular case because the OP wants to build it for him/herself first.

and what?!

You have started the process already. And, you have already hit your first roadblock. The question is how to interpret their lack of enthusiasm.

> Do they not share the 'difficulty' that bugs you enough to create a solution?

> Did your explanation suck? Some ideas are hard to describe in the abstract or we are just poor at articulating problem, approach, solution and benefits.

> Is this one of those things that doesn't resonate when talking about it but actually trying the tech would hook people?

> This might be reflective of future market reaction and even a well executed implementation will still only appeal to a very small subset of the people who could reasonably benefit.

Other posts are right that you may never know for certain until you actually make it, but there is plenty you can do to mitigate the risk. If you are going to build something with the goal of helping other people and not just yourself, you should be building and researching iteratively to prevent wasted time.

Asking friends in your likely target audience is a good approach. There could be a few reasons why they aren't excited: - you are describing features rather than benefits - you haven't identified compelling benefits - you aren't successfully communicating compelling benefits - they aren't actually your target audience - the product idea actually is not very useful

Don't worry - this is a much more challenging process than many people realize. Many potentially great products are shelved due to the challenges of identifying and communicating value. If you are very motivated to work on this, think a little harder on the problem you are solving and the benefits you want to provide. Value can in many cases be boiled down to providing an improvement in the experience of using the idea itself, and/or providing an improvement in helping get to a future state that the user wants to achieve. Hope this helps.

If one thing is useful, then it will be used. The main problem is you can say that only after this thing is done. The way i work with my customers is using a mockup. A graphical interface that simulates interaction and use case. Explain your ideas creating a context, an environment (mobile o pc) and satisfying one need at the time. You'll be successful on defining what is useful or not. You can use Balsamiq as tool.

Why is it a problem if it's only useful to you? Build the thing you want, and if it really is useful it will have been worth the effort. Really though you aren't a unique snow flake, none of us are, we're mostly predictable carbon copies of each and if you truly have made something useful for yourself, then you've probably made something useful for others as well.

You won't. I've built pretty intricate front-end stuff and presented at local front-end meetups only to be met with a whimper. Like other forms of art, it's pretty much impossible to know whether or not your project or product is going to be a hit. Make it for yourself first and if it's meant to be that it takes off it will.

I am more than half way through this book Will It Fly by Pat Flynn. He lays out this pretty easy to use method to help you build a market map and do customer development for free. I would say give this a try and you may get more data to make a better idea if your building something that solve an existing problem people would pay for.

I agree with everyone else, you don't know. Microsoft fails often. Google fails often. Everyone fails often.

I think the best solution is to strip your idea down to the very core, and launch it asap to gauge user interest. That way, you'll get your answer, and waste the the smallest amount of time and resources.

I think it's more useful to know if they have the problem you have (not whether they think the idea is good). Then, if they do -- what they think about how important it is and if they have tried to solve it.

If they have the problem, think it's important, tried to look for solutions (maybe even tried one), then you can find out more about the criteria of the solution they are looking for and the progress they are trying to make in their lives.

If they don't have the problem, or if they do, but it's not a big deal to them, then whatever solution you have isn't going to be interesting (so, what they say about it doesn't matter) -- move on to find people with the problem.

If no one has the problem, it may be interesting to solve it for yourself (if it is meaningful to you).

Even if you talk to people about your idea and they love it that doesn't mean that they'll actually buy it. You can increase your likelihood of success by finding a problem first and then making a product that solves that problem. This takes a lot of research.

In my opinion you should build this for yourself if you'll find it useful but don't get too fixated on selling it to others if it doesn't get traction. If your goal is to build a business do your research first and then produce the product, not the other way around.

Thank you everyone, these are some most useful advices I ever got from HN.

I think the people I talked to so far doesn't have exactly the same problem I have, or they don't know they have the problem yet. And I definitely suck at describing my ideas in words.

I have already started building the prototype, in the end even if it's just useful to myself, I would still end up with a useful tool and a lot of knowledge gained developing it.

> how do I know if I'm building something only useful to myself but not a group of people like me?

Get true market validation-- can you target and find more individuals (outside your circle of friends) who can give you impartial feedback on components of your product/service? If you find a buyer that's usually a good indicator.

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