My takeaways: Asking users what they want isn't always useful. Enthusiasts communities can be very negative to new ideas or members.
You know like the rite of passage for sorority they make you drink something nasty and now you are one of them? That is just to make fun of people and see who is bigger looser that does what others ask him to do.
If you look at responses in this thread there are couple mods in there replying. They are bashing main post here as well. Because if you are not interested in growing community but just drive by dropping something that is not it. Just getting to know how they communicate seems like what psychopath would do.
Investing in process like that is never going to be a good business strategy. That is why most companies just pay the ads.
-- maybe Henry Ford
I have always had better luck by building what I thought was a good solution, presenting that to the customer, then making incremental changes afterwards. If you think about basically any revolutionary product ever made, it was probably not a thing that anyone was explicitly asking for.
That's your job, as a founder, to design a solution that fix the problem. (It can be as small as a landing page with your value prop on it and some fake demo)
In fact, I've been roasted in a few subs and get some really good feedback from others. If you want to validate an idea, just get as much feedback as possible. The negative ones are the better most of the time. You learn a lot from them!
That's really not the majority. What i understood afterwards was: the guys there weren't my target, my product didn't help them at all. They felt like I'm promoting out of the blue, and i got my ass kicked.
I just moved on and found a most targeted subs
Even if a solution people are using has flaws, with regular use they get so used to its idiosyncrasies that they can't imagine it not working the way it does. It's very difficult to have them think creatively about a better way to do things at that point.
I think there's a bit of Stockholm syndrome in it as well, for lack of a better term. You get attached to the technology because now you know its ins and outs. If it gives you the results you want, what more could you want at that point?
If someone comes along and shows you "a better way", you might become violently dismissive because you're so attached to your solution.