Ask HN: How to validate your market before building an MVP?

How did you go about picking those 220 people? Did you put together user personas based on who your ideal customer is?

What questions did you ask these people? For example; you can't say, "How much would you pay for this?" Your friends will tell you what you want to hear and strangers will, as often as not, say some variation of "It should be free!"

Also, it's really hard for people to understand an idea based on a pitch. You'll have a lot more success if you can put a prototype in their hands and watch how they use it and note what kinds of questions they ask.

My company built a whole service on market validation because we found there are a lot of would-be entrepreneurs as well as existing business owners who are concerned with how to determine if their idea is viable. They're also frustrated with how expensive it can be. One client was told "Write us a check for $400,000 and we'll see how far we can get" without any consideration for whether the idea has merit! We help them determine that for a fraction of the cost, including building the prototype for them.

So, don't give up! Just because you're not getting any responses doesn't necessarily mean your idea is bad. You probably just haven't been asking the right people.

I read an interesting book about how to approach customers and friends about your startup. The main thing is: don't ask biased questions and don't ask directly about your idea.

Instead of asking "do you like the idea", "will you buy my product" ask about "do you have such problem", "which tool do you use NOW to solve this issue", "have you looked for some paid solution" and so on.

I reached out to my friends to email-intro me to anyone who might be interested in my product. That mutual connection made it so that people were way more willing to jump on a call to discuss the problem space.

I made sure to be respectful and mindful of their time on each interview call. At the end of the call I asked them to refer me to anyone else that might be interested too. That way, the number of potential interviewees kept growing.

Eventually we did enough phone interviews to be confident to proceed with the development.

So you're skipping a few steps but I think you have a good chance of avoiding wantrepreneur land... your post is a good start.

TLDR; Custom > Service > Customized Product > product

Longer version with steps:

1) find a problem

2) find someone that needs that problem solved, solve it for them

3) find someone else that has a similar problem, use some of the stuff from problem solve #1 to make this build faster, but build new stuff that the person from problem #1 might want to buy

4) Sell person #1 the stuff from build #2

5) now you have some things that you can try to sell to other people, it will probably require some customization, but you'll start to get the core of your future product in each build

6) after few more customers you basically have your product, you just need to polish it and then take everything you've learned to find more people that resemble the people you just sold to to go find more people.

7) you no longer need any advice from anyone, you are busy selling your product

Oh wow, i had never read anything like this advice. Did you apply this yourself?

If the problem I found requires a fair amount of time to solve for person 1, do you have any advice to avoid making something that only caters to that person and that’s not extensible to person #2?

I've worked for myself a couple of times, where I get to various degrees through the process... I've typically found a sweet spot with doing custom work that has proprietary code that I can apply towards new clients... the work tends to be more interesting for me.

It might also be worth mentioning that product ownership isn't intrinsically better than providing a service if you have your business model honed really well. We tend to promote that bigger is always better and that scale is the only way to make money... neither are inherently true.

... but the above comment I was putting forward is based on the team from Basecamp and my business mentors.

Regarding your question: The process takes balance and focus. Arguably, a harder part is customer selection to find the right client to help you with both your short term and long term goals.

I would like to second this as great advice. I built my company exactly this way. Ended up doing something completely different than what I originally did, but that’s how it seems to go. The best way to start a business is to start one: get a customer and solve a problem for them. The best way I’ve found to get customers is to call your friends, past coworkers etc. since you’re early on, it’s harder to get strangers to trust you. I had no luck early on trying to find customers online, picking up the phone and connecting with people is the best way. I still get customers that way and do bacially no advertising or marketing.

1) Regarding the bias on friends feedback I highly recommend you the book "The Mom Test". It's a great read on user interviews for product validation.

2) Have you tried cold emailing people? It tends to work better than linkedin in my experience. Look for people who blogged or tweeted about topics related to your product. Not everybody will respond but people that the time to share what they know have a tendency to help other people.

Unless it's super exciting most folks won't sign up. Go for interview. Reach out to people but ask to talk to them to understand their problem. If your product solves their problem, then offer it. If it doesn't, you can bend it to solve their problem and then get them to try it. Best of luck. BTW, you should checkout YC's startupschool

If your project is your last submission (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20576135, https://landing.leap.la), you should read the rules for Show HN and submit it as a Show HN. That has much better odds of getting you some kind of useful feedback.

https://news.ycombinator.com/show

Yes, this is why I didn't post as Show HN. Show HN requires you to actually build the stuff first...

It sounds like you followed good steps, but actually de-validated your product. Back to the drawing board ...