Ask HN: Can we sell a tiny product on day 1 with almost no followers? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Can we sell a tiny product on day 1 with almost no followers?

15 pointssawirricardo25 comments

Hi, my name is Ricardo. As of now, I am a maker of tiny products, you can say I build products within 24 hours and try to sell it. I still believe this works as I had 1 sale. (But, the problem is that... it is still 1 sale). I don’t know if it is due to my small followers (22 in Twitters plus a few in Product Hunt) or simply the products I built didn’t meet the needs of the community. I would appreciate your thoughts and suggestions. Thank you.

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The answer is yes, but this would be a lot harder.

To gain trust of your audience, you can first help them in online forum / slack where they hang out online. You can start by answering question they ask, and take note of the question and "why" they asked this question (eg: why do they ask this on the forum? what are they trying to achieve). Once you have helped enough people, and visibly online in public, you will start gaining trust of them, and you would notice pattern of the common question asked by your audience (which means reoccuring pain), then you can start building a product based on this pain, and you can be confident that this would sell as this actually solve a pain the audience is facing.

A shortcut for finding an audience which you can help quickly, is to choose audience which have the same occupation / profession as you.

Noted soulchild37, thanks for your advice. Are you also currently building/selling something by the way?

Yes, I used to target iOS dev audience as I am one myself, but now I am switching to web dev as I find it more fun.

I have sold $5k+ worth of ebook on iOS dev over 2 years here : https://autolayout.fluffy.es , not a lot but I think it is a good experience.

Now I am still looking on what product to build for web dev audience haha

If you want to continue doing this, you will need to keep building audience and selling different products to the same audience. The hardest part of point sales is trust. Even if you sell something at 1$, there is a trust deficit when you buy from stranger.

So focus on spreading your ideas, why these small problems matter, keep at them. One day isn't enough to know if problem is relevant sometimes it takes a few years. Focus on finding audience that closely matches your lifestyle and you will likely have many problems that are common with this audience. Then build your tiny solutions.

Finding new users is extremely time consuming. Most companies survive through expansion (solve other problems for same customer)

Hm trust deficit is a new term for me :). I try to tweet regularly though, for around 2 weeks now, but still see no fruits in this audiencing stuffs. I dont want to complain here, just kind of sighing :] makes me understand that building audience is not a thing to be taken for granted. If you dont mind, what channel do you use to find your user?

Riding in the same boat bro!

I tried to build & ship a simple tool [1] in one month(not 1 day btw), which got almost 0 customer engagement - just few comments on how good the idea is.

This made me question myself on solving a bigger problem & I spent around 5 months on a ML based product.Which eventually turned out out of my ML knowledge's reach (couldn't hire one too); so I stopped working on it & put it aside for sometime later.

Right now, like you, I'm working on building an audience on reddit/IH/twitter; so that I can ship my short-sprinted projects.

[1]: https://suppme.netlify.app/

Hi friend! I saw it, but it seems you haven't monetized it yet? CMIIW. Did you plan to receive kudos instead of putting a paywall?

Also, high five, it kinda feels lonely when working our product? I felt that online community in HN/IH/twitter/reddit (I cannot, though haha), can make us feel lonely. Let me know if I can help you.

Supp friend :)

I kind of build it as MVP-freemium & had future plans for additional paid features.But after such poor initial response,I lost hope & dropped it.Now that I'm less emotionally attached with it(after nearly 6 months & a little mature), came to realization that should've spent more time & efforts in marketing.Back then, I had very limited reach in online community(0 followers, near 0 karma etc).I am working on it currently and trying to make it a fore of habit.

The maker world is lonely indeed.Would love to get in touch with you.My contacts are available on my portfolio.Lets catch up sometime soon!

Thanks for following on Twitter, friend. Let's support each other *thumb

“Tiny” as in small, intricate and expensive or “tiny” as in tiny price? If it is a self-evidently compelling product for a niche or mass US market, the threshold in the US for “tiny price” (as in reflexively whipping out the CC) for a HN sort of community was $500 US, but that was a few years ago. More than $500, and you have to provide supporting arguments for why it is worth it.

Oh what I meant for tiny before was a product you literally built within 24 hour. (Or probably a week). Also, in my case here it usually like an info product or some graphic assets that I can built within short time. In days, probably.

However, nice to know from your perspective, that $500 is actually quite big in my country (a developing one). So really appreciate that info @onecommentman

You’ve gotta think about the value you’re bringing to your customers. You’ve had 1 sale which is good, that shows it is something at least someone wants. But consider this: if you’re spending 1 day on building something, the barrier to someone else building it is very low.

Since this is HN, I’m assuming this is some sort of software. Building software is complicated and there is a reason most tools out there have lots of engineers working full time on it. You’re not going to retire off of a quick 24 hour build session. Nor even by building hundreds of little one day tools.

This practice could be good to find a market where there is clearly a need, but building a quality product, not a quick one, is where you’ll derive the most success.

Sure, sales and marketing can help you profit off of lower quality apps (not a judgment of your skill, but 24 hours isn’t enough time to build a quality app that has any level of complexity), but it will only get you so far.

They weren't tiny products but I've done this multiple times without an existing audience by posting around on places like reddit and HN, or relying on app store search traffic.

Obviously it would need to be something that people were willing to pay for, and presentation can help a lot.

Oh if you don’t mind, what presentation do you mean? And my country restrict access to reddit so unfortantely I don’t have Reddit as a card to promote the product. I wish there are some service to promote to reddit community without going to reddit.

Also, if I may know, what products did you build?

Not a tiny project as I mentioned, but this is my recent project that I grew from no audience (a website SEO checker for Chrome):

https://www.checkbot.io/

By presentation, I mean it helps if it look clean and professional (minimalism is fine though) for people to buy.

Wow, that looks solid on first look friend. How long have you worked this project?

I got your point by the time I looked at your landing page :thumbup

Sounds like you need to learn about marketing, and just keep learning. Soak up like a sponge everything you can find. Indiehackers is a good community. I'm inspired though and I love the idea of 24h products (how many actual hours do you do in the 24? Do you sleep?).

Haha sometimes I miss the time when we can just build product , put it online, and people just come and if they find the value, buy the product. :)

I am on indie hackers too by the way, but it seems I see that posts in Indiehacker kind of filled with marketings? I still try to look on the positive side though

And yeah, it’s an Idea for me actually. I am the type that cannot really work on a product for too long. I would try ti ship fast enough and see if the product sell, and based on that decide to iterate/improve/market more, and so on.

But that is also a problem if i dont have much people following. Almost no exposure to garner feedback, etc

What type of product?

Usually what I can think is an info product. A small app can work too. I build hnanalytics.sawirstudio.com might be the example of small app from my mind.

I built some info products, but it doesnt really produce anything. Which is why I say probably because of me have almost no followers or the products indeed didnt have the market

I'm guessing you don't have enough data to make any determination. Perhaps look at how competitive the space is for your apps and see if there is a market out there that you don't know about?

You can say that. Did you mean data as in...statistic of the market? If you don't mind where do you usually go for that data?

You can use Google Adwords and do a search on the keywords for your product and see the keyword volume and avg bid price. That will tell you roughly there is someone searching for what you are selling.

That's a possibility. Thank you for sharing @ApolloRising

If you need help send me a message

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