Tips for rapidly iterating on your product when finding product-market fit | Hacker News Reader

Tips for rapidly iterating on your product when finding product-market fit

oncommand.io

92 pointsrglover10 comments

I just got off a 30 minute Zoom call with a marketing research guy and he called this "Qualitative Research". Walk through your idea with 5 to 7 people one at a time, improving each time. Do this _before_ you even write any code. You'll save yourself a ton of time, though this is harder to do...because you actually have to find people within your target market and induce them to work with you. A $25 Amazon Gift Card might just be the trick.

Once you've iterated and your interviews tighten up, you know you're ready to design and build.

Then you have to go through it all over again to validate it or pivot.

Key points:

* Learn to be ruthless about throwing away work

* Reduce your scope

* Use patterns and keep your code organized

* Build what people are asking for

This is so true, * Build what people are asking for.

And what is taken for granted is that it requires time and effort to get people to ask. Meaning, go to market ASAP!

I think this is where "Fake it until you make it" is a good idea.

If you have any product at all and a decent website you can hopefully at least get people to talk to you and they will ask if your product can do X,Y,Z. Even if your product is pretty basic you can at least tell them that you would like to learn more about X,Y,Z so that you can build that and be ready to say yes to the next potential customer who has the same question. This is probably a better approach than calling up CEOs and asking "What are your problems?" They have 1 million problems. You need to start with a MVP and ask what problems they have which seems somewhat related to the MVP

Even "basic" can get muddled with hopefulness about product features which are carts leading horses. To continue with the metaphor, chasing carrots before the horse-cart even functions leads to half-baked software.

And make sure it's not your CEO or other internal staff that inadvertently become your customer - then you end up building for people in the office, vs. your actual customer.

This is weirdly meta, a blog post about iterating a SaaS product that itself is a tool for customers to manage iterating their own SaaS products. I look forward to the next post about how his content marketing targeting likely users on HN was successful!

As for the actual advice, most of it seems reasonable. However, I fear the insistence on keeping code perfectly organized and the choice of fancy tools might not be pure business pragmatism.

On the other hand, keeping the code well maintained and using fancy tools may increase speed over many iterations.

We'll see!

My code isn't perfect (I wish), just organized enough to help me move fast.

Not really any fancy tools in use, quite a bit of old stuff.

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