How and when to acquire SaaS users | Hacker News Reader

How and when to acquire SaaS users

themvpsprint.com

236 pointstimjones97 comments

> Distribution before product

I don't like this new startup trend[1][2], nor do I think it actually works.

Literally all of those examples are the opposite of what the blog post is claiming. They did have a product: Hotmail had the service built out, Eventbrite had the service built out, and there was a Dropbox before you could refer your friends to it. There are examples of what the author is claiming, but most are gimmicky Kickstarter-style (and often derivative) products.

I mean, think about Dropbox or Slack or Instagram: how could you possibly sell (or even validate the idea of) those products without actually giving some sort of demo? Without people actually using that thing? It might work for something like the product in the post (people understand what "video chat" is), but I don't really see it working for any kind of particularly novel or value-generating product.

Followup: grabbed a coffee, and this post got a bit of attention. To be clear, I think that an MVP should be just that: a minimum viable product. By definition, you shouldn't be able to go leaner. I also think that sometimes people conflate "fake it 'til you make it" with PG's "do things that don't scale" -- these two are not the same.

[1] https://tommorkes.com/lean-launch-how-to-sell-an-idea-before...

[2] https://hbr.org/2013/12/sell-your-product-before-it-exists

Funny you mention Dropbox because they did exactly what you say not to do, provide a video demo that doesn't actually work, it just looks like it's working [0]. Their Show HN thread has more details [1].

In general though, you definitely should work on figuring out if customers want your product without building it if at all possible, and most times it is possible. I run a SaaS that's a project management tool (todo list + calendar, basically, at https://getartemis.app) and the main page is simply a video demo that I made with Figma and an animation tool called Principle. People signed up and it works great for showing users what they'd be getting in the future.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QmCUDHpNzE

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

> ...provide a video demo that doesn't actually work, it just looks like it's working

This is not true, the video used a few clever techniques (cutting/editing) to make it seem snappier and more responsive, but Dropbox was very much a real (albeit beta and buggy) product when the video was made.

That is true, the founder did have an alpha version working by the time they did the Show HN, but still, if he had made the video without having anything technically made (but just by visual effects), would it still have been less effective? I doubt it, people know what they want and don't want when watching the video, and it would have been clear to the founder that people wanted it and he could've started building it after people expressed their demand. So in the end, even if he hadn't made the full product, Dropbox would still be where it is today.

It was really inspiring and grounding to see a “Show HN” thread with Dropbox, pre-fame. Thanks!

The first comment is also legendary in the HN community.

I had a great time reading the comments! Amusing to see the (natural) mixed skepticism and praise for a new product.

I think selling a product that doesn't yet exist may work without an MVP, especially if it's a completely novel idea where none exists. We launched recently (and got paid customers on day 1, no mailing list, no large # of followers, no marketing spend) in a relatively established market niche and didn't run into the problems of finding customers, because customers were already looking for that solution and liked what they saw. We also needed to build out the whole product before the first revenue dollar.

I think strategies differ depending on:

- How new the market is for that particular product

- How big of a risk is it to adopt your product vs alternatives

- How polished it looks (inverse relationship to how many solutions already exist)

In some cases, you may need a much more polished MVP to get people to bring out their credit cards. If your product is the only one of its kind (and is in high demand), the UI is less important in v1.

I'm only advocating for reducing uncertainty around distribution before building; not eliminating it entirely.

It's important to at least have a strong growth hypothesis that you've validated to some degree.

That's all I have right now - hypotheses.

I think this is a fair point, and maybe I was too critical. There's been a trend of "fake it 'til you make it" lately, which I think really appeals to non-engineer types. Engineers have the opposite problem: building too much before anything is validated.

I think I understand both viewpoints: it is indeed not feasible to fake it before you make it in case of Dropbox. However, if you are offering automated reports once a week, there is no problem putting together an HTML template, some excel sheet and an email script where a person does the work for a few pilot customers. So I think when you mentioned "particularly novel or value-generating product" you meant that the idea scores close to 0 on a "fake it before you make it" scale? Is there even such a scale? Barrier of entry is closest I can think of.

I think a lot of folks get confused between various MxPs (where x = [remarkable, viable, loveable, marketable/sellable]), I know we did, and thought we must be doing something horribly wrong.

This blog post captures some of the differences: https://archive.is/wip/tnm2D (skip to conclusion). This one elaborates what an MLP is: https://medium.com/the-happy-startup-school/beyond-mvp-10-st...

I think the problem is the with the name. An MVP is most often not a product, but a prototype that you use to test some hypothesis. That’s it. It you are lucky and validate them, great. Trash the Prototype and build the real product.

I think the idea is you do give a demo, just that you dont go crazy engineering-wise to implement NASCAR login, kubernetes scale-out and all sorts of stuff before you've tested the market for interest. It is basically taking the idea of MVP down a notch to BVP (barely viable product).

I've never done this, but it makes sense. Why spend the engineering effort to go from Demo --> BVP --> MVP when you can just do the first jump and test the idea.

Everything is on a spectrum and -- given the vast graveyard of random ideas engineers build as side projects -- we should figure out a better way to drive better yield.

Just today Redpanda hit HN front page https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25075739 and I cannot see how would you give a demo of such a system without having such a system developed in the first place. At the very least, the whole of HN would laugh at such a salesman trick. I do think there is a spectrum of fake-it-before-you-make-it ability for each idea. For some like Instagram is close to 100% and for things like Redpanda it's close to zero.

Yes I think you described this approach well. I've worked on a bunch of things built this way... as an overall approach it will certainly minimize the chance that you waste time building something totally un-sellable.

On the other hand, I've seen organizations using this "BVP" approach for absolutely everything they build, which I've come to view as a sort of product development antipattern, reflecting some lack of ambition/conviction/vision at the top. It's like the polar opposite of a moonshot: building things in such tiny increments that you can only ever achieve a local maxima, because the higher summit requires a bigger leap.

>> reflecting some lack of ambition/conviction/vision at the top

Sure, but my assumption would be -- if you suddenly get registrations, signups, or even conditional trial accounts, great! Now I have some validation, and I'd jump in immediately and start building out the product fully.

...then, if I get even more engagement, even greater! Now I can start planning some scale-out.

What is NASCAR login?

A NASCAR login is a stack of login options (Login with Apple, Login with Google, Login with Facebook, Login with Twitter, Login with Github...) where you end up having so many stacked logos that it starts to look like a NASCAR racecar (because they have tons of logos on them.)

https://nascar.nbcsports.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/9/2020...

Google Identity reference to NASCAR Login: https://developers.google.com/identity/toolkit/images/federa...

NASCAR logins are particularly great (easy entry to convert interested users) and at the same time having a huge number of super-ugly edge cases:

1. If you log in with john.q.doe@gmail.com but originally had registered your gmail as johnqdoe, then your login automatically changes to the non-dot form.

2. If you have already registered via email on john.q.doe@gmail.com, then you cannot login-with-Google in the above case, as both accounts are separate and distinct in the host system.

3. If you have two accounts under your school and work account, but log-in-with-Facebook, and Facebook has both your emails, it gets confused.

4. There are cases where you simply cannot log in due to the network of conflicts across the identity services.

...and yet this is also awesome because you get to convert a registered user ASAP in 95% of the cases.

A login page that has a million logos on it (login with facebook, login with google, etc)

What's the definition of MVP then?!

Indeed! M means minimum! If anything, the step below an MVP should be called a NYVP ("Not-Yet Viable Product"), which should hopefully remind eager sales folks that it might be ready to demo but not ready to sell.

vaporware

I applaud your success. To me it seems that by putting distribution first, or focusing on problems to solve, that you typically end up with markets or problems you are personally not really excited about. I've done this exercise many times. I can either work on something I think is cool and there is a niche market for, but does not really "solve" a problem but addresses a "want", or I can work on something I have zero interest in but for which there probably is a market and clear distribution model. If I like adventure games, and want to make one, those don't solve a problem, and it's a niche market with a lot of competition (gaming in general). Or I can work on some online tax prep software for expats. Niche market, addresses a problem, zero personal interest, probably a big market.

Thank you!

There are some people for whom growing a business is the exciting part. They can get excited about tax prep software if they see the opportunity.

I'm more like you (not one of those people). If I don't care about the problem, and (maybe more importantly) the users I'm solving it for, I won't solve it well.

Another point - not everything has to be a business - you can always work your day job and build adventure games on nights and weekends purely for fun.

Sometimes the best businesses come out of hobby projects. If not, whatever - it's fun and fulfilling.

I think most people want to run a business around something they really care about or are excited about, so when you have to run one around something you have zero interest in then I don't see the advantage anymore compared to taking a day job at some company.

you get to choose what to validate. So you can figure out which of the ideas that are acceptable to work on is worth it.

You really hit the nail here! I have written about this (https://www.indiehackers.com/post/the-myth-of-interesting-bo...) and I am still struggling to break from this. If the problem is interesting, it is probably cutting-edge in some way, ergo it is hard to solve, hard to bootstrap.

The best way imo to break this, is to build a bunch of small things that individually work but collectively point to and solve a more difficult problem. Kaleido.ai is a good example of this, they have created remove.bg and unscreen as individual products but are building something full-fledged.

I'm doing the same with CAD tools for Architects.

I started building https://cadcheck.xyz which brings me slightly closer to a larger solution that would be nearly impossible to build without VC funding.

> build a bunch of small things that individually work but collectively point to and solve a more difficult problem.

Not sure if this fits your description, but the first thing that comes to mind are the tidyverse packages

> Niche market, [...] , probably a big market

Which one is it then?

I think niche market / big market is always subjective and very poorly defined in general leading to confusion. When chatting with a VC, "niche" probably means "not worth investing into, too small" in their simplified language even though you could mean simply that it's a subsection of some huge industry which is in itself huge. Like first person shooters in the game industry.

Maybe a weird example: most fursuit builders also take mascot commissions from non-furries. They target a small niche, but also a big market.

A niche of a giant can still be considered “big”.

Good on you for breaking out of a cycle that wasn't working. I think you're really speaking to something that's becoming increasingly true - distribution is at least as important as, if not more important than, products themselves. We've moved past "if you build it they will come" to something more akin to "if enough people are already coming to you, you can build something, and they'll try it."

Agreed! I think this is becoming even more important as the barriers to building software products shrink.

Every day, there are dozens of products being launched on ProductHunt - many of them without code.

The "easy" distribution channels are being flooded.

I think you've gone from one extreme to the other. Yes, building a product with no distribution sucks. So does doing distribution without having anything to show for it.

Take this from a guy who spent 2 years studying distribution channels [1]. There's nothing wrong about spending a week or two developing a MVP before focusing on distribution.

I think the key is to start with 1) The minimum thing you can do and call a 'product' 2) Try to promote/distribute it to see the response. So far you've done:

a) A web page explaining what your product is about

Some steps to (progressively) get to a "better" MVP may be:

b) Make a video showcasing your product (which can be a simple Figma design with static screens that show once you click on them)

c) Build a feature that's high on the ICE Scoring model [2], and distribute that

d) Build a meaningfully different feature than c) and promote it as a SEPARATE product. Let your features be like split tests you promote on the same/different distribution channels and see how they perform.

[1] https://firstpayingusers.com

[2] https://university.hygger.io/en/articles/2288376-ice-scoring

You've posted your link 23 times in the last month—that's well over the line into spamming.

Even apart from that, your account is using HN primarily for promotion, which is against the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

We ban accounts that do these things, so if you wouldn't mind reviewing the guidelines and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful. The intended spirit is intellectual curiosity, which is not at all the same thing as having something to promote, though it's fine to bring up one's own work as part of good conversation.

I agree that there's nothing wrong with spending a week or two developing an MVP first.

I don't plan on spending more than 3-4 weeks building an MVP, which I'll start within 2 weeks.

An advantage that my current approach gives me is a few dozen low-commitment (but qualified) waitlist users that have shown some initial interest.

I obviously have some close friends that will try it out with their teams. But going distribution-first allows me to easily expand beyond that close circle to a more unbiased group of people.

Sorry to nitpick, but some of your examples illustrate that they certainly had an MVP and THEN did the distribution. How could hotmail perform distribution without first having an MVP?

I agree with the premise of validation, then building. While this is a good rule of thumb, it's not always possible. I like the focus and thinking behind getting users. It can't be "built it and they will come". Having a good, sound plan and sticking with it is the key.

My main point was that these companies likely had strong hypotheses about how they would grow before building an MVP.

You don't always need to prove out all your growth channels. But it's important to have strong hypotheses and remove at least a little bit of uncertainty around those hypotheses before building.

I see that, but you don't talk about this - your main point - in the case studies, at all. Of course it's difficult to, since they don't discuss it and so you have to infer it, but if it's your main point, you probably do need to mention it in the case study.

Your heading "My side projects always fail" makes me think the problem is getting initial adoption (not going from small adoption to huge adoption). The network effects of those three examples don't kick in until after some adoption.

I like the idea of considering not just the product or the market, but also how you to reach that market. It can change your choice of which idea to pursue in the first place. Really, to evaluate as a business idea, not just as a product idea

You're right; I certainly could've delved deeper into those case studies.

I suppose at this point in the article, if you're not yet convinced that distribution is half the battle, you won't care about the rest of the article.

OK, it makes sense as support for the importance of distribution (the claim that "distribution is half the battle"), but there are other claims made, and it wasn't that that was the specific one you were supporting.

Now I know what you meant, this really is just nitpicking.

It seems like you need a strong hypothesis for growth and a strong hypothesis for customer acquisition. It seems like knowing what you're going to build can help drive how you will distribute, and but vice versa seems less obvious.

It is a situation where both are required (`&`).

Good luck with the projects!

Well written blog post! A few observations from an outsiders perspective:

* One interesting thing I have noticed from being on HN is that lots of start-ups that focus on the tech industry / IT / helping developers. I think it makes sense to pick a niche you understand, but possibly not if it is a 'niche' which is filled with developers.

* Workplace collaboration in a 'knowledge work' environment = red ocean. Application of workplace collaboration tools to new/unexplored industry segments I suspect has lots of blue ocean areas however. I think you have picked something in the red ocean.

* As a small note, you started with a solution (always on video room, inspired by a twitter post) and worked backwards to a problem to solve (teammates not being fully engaged). The usual process would be to start with a problem and then work out how you are going to solve it. I know it sounds like semantics, but there are lots of potential solutions to "teammates feel disconnected" and an always on video room is just one of them! (e.g. coffee roulette, remote pizza parties).

Thanks for the thoughts!

I agree on your first point. This is the easier niche for me right now, but probably not the best niche.

I 100% agree with your second point too. My first step was supposed to be "Choose a problem" (https://www.themvpsprint.com/p/choose-a-problem). But I can spot the flaws in how I presented this - it looks like I was starting with a potential solution someone asked about on Twitter.

That being said, the solution I'll be building is actually quite different from an "always on zoom room" - more focused on teams that operate largely asynchronously.

I'll be formalizing and sharing my product vision over the next week or two :)

Great post mate.

I followed a similar pattern and created https://sayoname.com, an app for remotely located workers so they can record names and call each other directly from the browser. A tool so people can easily find how to say someone's name, sneak on what someone does in the company etc.

I almost got a big school hooked up to start paying subscription (it is an international school) but they decided on creating their own solution due to privacy concerns. Extremely disappointing and lowers morale straight away.

I have few hundred profiles but the growth is stale atm. I don't really have time to actively look for new users and would love a co-founder as what they say on y-combinator it is REALLY a lot easier if you have someone you can share thought and can both motivate each other. So my advice is add a step and get a co-founder.

No offense intended, but your landing page is a bit rough. If you don't mind some feedback:

- The header "The simplest tool for remote and international teams" doesn't mean anything. The simplest tool for doing what? I have no idea what this is after reading it.

- On a related note, I'm not really sure what the name of the service is. Is it meant to be like "Say Yo Name"? If so, maybe you could change the header to something like "Say Yo Name! Help your remote and international teammates pronounce your name"

- The undismissable floating "start video chat" box is really awful, especially on mobile where it takes up almost half the screen.

- "the whole team creates profiles and record names" -> "records names”

- "Call users using build in video chat functionality" -> "built-in"

- "Add video chat to any website. It is a couple line of HTML to copy to any website." is awkward. I'd suggest changing the second line to "...with only a couple lines of code" or something similar.

- "Pronunciation is different, though, not easier, at all." is a really awkward sentence. "Pronunciation is different, though not at all easier." is much clearer.

- "Next time don't pretend that your colleague hasn't got a name." -> "Next time don't pretend that your colleague doesn't have a name."

- "Start video chat, share screen, no camera? Just chat!" -> "Start video chat or share your screen. No camera? Just chat!"

No offense taken!

Appreciate your feedback, it is probably due to the fact English is my second language.

I'll have a look at updating the website taking into consideration your comments!

Best of luck with your service! I hope you're able to keep with it and make it viable.

Looks like a neat tool!

I had 2 cofounders in my last company - I agree it's easier.

But so far, building in public has been a great way to replicate some of those benefits without one:

1. I have external motivation to produce results on a weekly basis.

2. I have to be able to justify all my decisions to everyone on the internet (anyone who cares at least...). I end up thinking things through more deeply.

3. I get continuous feedback from others - not nearly as good as a cofounder who's 100% in the business, but still helpful.

Wow, as a fellow solo founder, building in public sounds like a great idea! I've always dismissed it in the past, but that's because I've never considered it from the perspective of getting some of the same benefits as having a co-founder.

Will definitely try to give it a shot.

Emphasis on some haha - I don't want to claim that the collective power of the internet is more valuable than a human that's 100% invested in the business :)

But yes, I'd definitely recommend it! Feel free to DM if want any tips - https://twitter.com/AnotherTimJones.

It was uncomfortable at first, but got easier pretty quickly (and honestly a lot of fun).

Yeah, definitely not deluding myself that it's anywhere close to the full cofounder experience, haha.

But sounds a lot better than the alternative of just building things completely in a silo like I have been doing.

Do you have slack/teams integration? The ability to link that in would be sweet.

Most likely will be built entirely in Slack :)

Feel free to DM me on Twitter if you had more specific ideas! https://twitter.com/AnotherTimJones/

I thought about adding this but due to stale growth put it aside. If I can see more people using it and requesting this I can assure I'll add integration in a week :)

Cool article, love the insight into the thought process and best of luck. But that name HelloHailey seems like literally an insane choice. I would never use it. As far as I know I’m the target market so may want to look at changing it if others agree!

Thank you! Definitely interested in hearing others' thoughts on the name as well.

Here was my thinking: As a solo, bootstrapped founder, I think people are interested in the person behind the product, at least at first.

I've been using my personal story and the process of building in public to grow an email list and waitlist. The HelloHailey name gives me an opportunity to re-enforce that personal story in the product messaging.

That being said, I'm not ruling out a name change when it comes time for an official launch.

Sounds like you need to “kill your darling” as it were. The number of people who you will reach if you scale is exponentially more than those who have already connected with your story.

why is the name "literally an insane choice"?

From the blog post:

  > Twitter is full of interesting and influential people sharing
  > thoughts and having public conversations. And they’re all
  > accessible - just 280 characters away.

Yes! Yes! Marketing has changed 1000% since the Dark ages! People forget that you can now marketing your product effortlessly and completely for free to everyone in the world. No more complaining that "my awesome product failed because no one knows about it" -- just press that Tweet button and you're on!

Ah, but getting your tweet actually read is a whole other ball of wax.

Step 1: Have 100,000 followers

Step 2: Instant Marketing Success

Step 3: Tell everyone how easy social media is

Literally describes 100% of IndieHackers threads about "I sold 540 copies of my products on Twitter in 8 hours".

> Step 1: Have 100,000 followers

I imagine one could swap “Have” for “Pay to work with someone who has”.

where do I sign up?!?!? marketing today costs money just like it did years ago, you are still paying for visibility and there is no "free" traffic anymore like there was in the late 90s.

Here are the steps to success:

1. Go to http://www.twitter.com.

2. Click Join Twitter today.

3. Type in this Tweet: "I have the perfect product! Email me for quote. #Growth #Product #MVP"

1) make website 2) send newsletter 3) ??? 4) profit!

How did that work for you when you did it?

Sounds like you might be interested in my personalized Product Marketing Workshops series to turn your idea into a success! Email me for a quote! Let's talk #Product!!

skips ad

I hope it's that easy! Until about 3-4 weeks ago, I'd rarely used Twitter for professional purposes.

It can be a bit intimidating at first to put yourself out there. And there's certainly strategy required to use it well.

But I think consistency is the name of the game to be successful with it. We'll see!

I've got to applaud you for thinking about distribution first. Many tech folks turned entrepreneurs (myself included) think that if they build a great product, they'll get usage. Doesn't work that way.

But I will also say that I suspect your strategy is possibly a little naive. I hope it's as easy as you've laid out, and I'm envious of the viral aspects of your proposed product. However, I suspect the "top of funnel" portion (hypothesis 1) won't be enough to drive your "land and expand" portion (hypothesis 2). At least in my own experience currently trying to build a B2B SaaS tool [0], it's an absolute grind. And while some of these communities you're mentioning will engage, it's hard to convert that to people entering your funnel in a reliable fashion. You've got to combine it with 19 others things like content marketing, speaking at events, etc.

That being said, we're not engaging in as transparent way as you are so YMMV. I wish you the best of luck!

0: https://kitemaker.co - a crazy fast issue tracker that connects all of your other tools (GitHub, Figma, Slack, Discord) better than anything else out there

Thank you! And I agree 100% with what you've said. I could preface every sentence with maybe and I think but then it wouldn't be on the HN front page :)

I know that everything I'm laying out will be much harder than I've made it seem. I see this strategy as being a north star, but necessarily a hard and fast path.

I've found that my side projects are very rarely about completing anything. Usually a side project is about chasing a curiosity in a piece of tech or a workflow change or something. "Could I build a faster CI pipe in Terraform?" "Could I write this Kafka consumer in Java?" "Can I containerize this?". Things that aren't really about "completing" or "shipping."

I think that people like me often forget that one of the biggest drivers for working on projects past when they become interesting is the money I receive for working on them. If I'm not being paid, it becomes difficult to fathom struggling for 10 hours on building something past when it's particularly interesting. Once any personal project would require basically any UI work, that's about when I bail (as I have no interest and actively dislike pretty much every UI-based technology I've ever encountered).

Getting paid to work is important to me.

I don’t really agree with a lot of what’s being said here.

If you have something that solves real problems, you should be able to fight for users. Yeah sure, just because you built a great thing doesn’t mean people will flock to it, you need to do SOME marketing.

It might take two years to get ten users, because turns out it’s very hard to run every aspect of a business by yourself. But it’s progress, and if you maintain a high bar of connection with your user base and product quality, as long as you continue to market and improve it will grow.

There are no “get rich quick” schemes here, I don’t believe in that nonsense. There is hard work and there is giving up, that’s it.

Most startup ideation follows the following sequence:

1. invent a bold new product

2. figure out how to market it

In other words, the "Eureka" moment is in the product ideation step, while the marketing step is basically a schlep. But the inverse approach might actually be better:

1. invent a bold new marketing strategy

2. figure out a product to sell with it

Don't assume that marketing is somehow a lower form of intellectual activity than engineering. It requires a strong aesthetic sense, a deep understanding of human psychology, mastery of technical tools, and the ability to be self-critical.

1. invent a bold new marketing strategy

2. figure out how to sell the strategy

It is the product.

Nice to see that you're transitioning from the developer mindset to the founder mindset, from building first to selling first. Many people don't understand that development is just one part of a successful company. They think that if you build it, they will come. I too have fallen into this trap multiple times until I had my latest startup idea (todo list + calendar for project management, https://getartemis.app). I simply made a landing page, used Figma and an animation tool called Principle to make a nice video, and put it on the landing page. Now I have over 1200 singups to the email list while I'm working on building the product.

Doing this has allowed me to do so many things, such as figuring out that there is indeed demand for the product, and directly talking to these potential users by setting up a call with them. Having a distribution channel is a powerful thing. It would be even better if I cultivated my Twitter audience, but an email list is a start, and it has some distinct advantages such as owning your distribution channel.

That's "marketing" not distribution. But maybe your term sounds cooler...

Thinking of open source development, some of this is implied, by platforms like github, and ideas like "release early, release often". So developers are dependent on this promtion/distribution platform, without even realizing they have one.

One new guy trying to tell the world that there is a process to start a successful business, there is not. Sometimes you fail, sometimes you succeed.

Some succeed more than others, but they never always succeed.

I wish you good luck for your project but changing your approach is not going to ensure you not to fail.

This won't work because programmers need to understand that the value they bring is in being able to build things. Marketing using shiny new features and a good product is simple, but an effective strategy as a developer.

Marketing magic by marketing gurus is it's own thing. They can artificially prop up a product using efficient advertising, connections, or lots of cash.

Ironically this is going to work because gathering a following for an interesting project is one way to do marketing. Lots of programmers succeed because they make tutorials, or they participate in a community where they build up a reputation.

There's this upcoming trend of "building in public". Founder/Developer sharing their journey to their audience while trying to get traction. I agree that launching your product to an engaged and consolidated audience give a boost but I also think that depends on which type of product you are building. For sure you need at least to have an MVP to show to your users.

I started doing this [0]. I think a lot of times solo founders like myself get stuck in a vacuum. It feels so isolating and demotivating that just sharing my random thoughts (even though I know noone is reading them) actually helps. It makes me feel like I'm having someone to share them with. It also might help start building an audience that I can discuss the product with.

[0] https://thedevfounder.com/

Unsolicited advice: your problem isn't great - sure engineering leaders want to increase personal connections between remote teammates, but is that one of their top problems and how much are they willing to pay to solve it

I would iterate until you find a problem that people are willing to pay a lot of money to fix.

Fun ideas without any possibility of a viable business model is what I am struggling with too. Ideas take away a lot of your time when you are chasing them and only once the prototyping is done or sometimes when the initial product is out you realise that there is no chance of making any money.

Then step one is foresight. And I say that from experience. I often view through lens of, yes I think it would be awesome if this concept existed, I could build it, but do I want to sell it? The answer is usually No.

Thanks. Trying to find books which teach how to evaluate ideas. Not a business graduate, but is this something that they teach in business schools?

My business school days were just before all the startup craze began. So I’m sure curriculum has changed. Entrepreneurship wasn’t really a major; or not at most schools at the time (early 2000s). My understanding is most formalized ways (lean,etc) are about idea validation and iteration. But even that assumes you want to burn some amount of energy on the idea. Validation in itself is hard work.

My personal approach is have the idea, maybe I’ll spend a day or few brainstorming (paper and pen), I sketch out the solution. I have a shorthand for this, I usually just sketch out the data model and I can visualize the front end functionality. I don’t need to do mock ups or wire frames. That’s a time suck. If I feel good that, this could be cool (useful, problem solving, easy to communicate, etc)...

I run through every user acquisition channel and think of a strategy. Think of tactical execution. What’s the likelihood _I_ could execute with success. The I in the last sentence is key. I see plenty of people executing big ideas I had, but could never had executed. Know your abilities. Do I need help? Do I want to hire(invest)? Do I want to spend money on ads?

I personally avoid anything free. I have noticed, if I expect something for free, it won’t come. For example, if you think about making something viral or network effect. Certainly build that in, and leverage it. But don’t hinge your success in it. It’s probably a multiplier and you need to build the base.

Once I get to the part about investing my money. I’m a pretty frugal person and don’t like wasting money growing hobby sites. So this is a good filter for me. It also helps me think of what does the product need to look like (mvp or further) before I feel like dumping resources into growth. Using this I can estimate how much work I have ahead of me. I only have 10-20 tinker time hours a week. So again do I need help? Am I going to dedicate weeks to an alpha/beta?

This type of thought process easily exposes most ideas to be things I just simply don’t want to do for some reason or another. This is just a simplified description of my personal way. I have a lot of biases like not wanting to seek VC funding, or really even have to build a team.

Thank you. That was a detailed, well thought out response.

An alternative approach to the who is going to buy the damn thing problem is to focus on the marketing to engineering ratio. If you build it customers will only come and buy if they know what it is and how it might work for them.

I found the article confusing, but the infographic at the end made everything worth it. Probably one of the best I've ever seen, and I take my hat off to the author!

4.) Give up and move on <-------- There's your problem

This is not a "great startup process". In any other industry, this is called a bait-and-switch. It is a form of fraud, and in many jurisdictions indictable.

What part exactly do you think would qualify as fraud?

Honest question: If you're going to pick hello<randomName> as a name, why not pick one with a .com?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com