Ask HN: How did you validate your webapp product/market fit? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How did you validate your webapp product/market fit?

58 pointsixacto28 comments

Those of you with a webapp or SASS who are currently making $, how did you validate product/market fit? Did you sign up paying customers before quitting your day job? Just trying to get some perspective here.

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I co-founded a niche SMB B2B SaaS product. Both my cofounder and I had day jobs. We worked nights/weekends to get to MVP and had 1 free beta customer use it during the day. After getting good feedback from the 1 customer we went to a trade show and got our first couple paying customers. I convinced my cofounder to leave his day job and I would use my salary to pay his bills until we got a few more customers so I could quit my day job. During that period we found an angel investor (a big potential customer who liked the MVP but wanted to see more features). I transitioned to full-time as soon as the check cleared. It worked! Though, luck and timing were the major factors involved for us. Good luck to you!

What is the product? If you can let us know. And what is the current status?

https://www.gingrapp.com/

An inspiring story! I'm curious, what was your tech stack?

I suspect given his background: PHP, React and Postgres.

I’d love to hear more!

I have to admit attending a trade show never crossed my mind (I tend to default into the ‘the product is digital, so all promotion must be digital too’ mindset). Thanks for sharing your story!

Thank you! I did my first trade show over the weekend and found it quite useful. I'm beginning to learn the ways to promote my products.

Haven't quit the day job, but am making decent money.

I've found a sort of sweet-spot where working a couple of hours before work, and sometimes on weekends forces me to really focus on what I'm building. So I don't see myself quitting my day job until the support workload becomes unmanageable.

For validating, I built a quick version in 7 days (https://onlineornot.com/building-saas-in-one-week-how-built-...), told the internet how I did it, kept building features, and customers kept coming back.

I'm curious why you used Divjoy for only billing. If you were to start again from scratch, would you use Divjoy at the start?

I started with the Next.js TypeScript Blog Template, and built things gradually, as I needed them.

By the time I realised I'd need a Stripe integration, I had already built enough functionality that it didn't make sense to replace everything with Divjoy.

If I were to start completely from scratch, sure, I'd use Divjoy from the start.

I think you can validate a market exists by talking to people and looking at existing products, but you can't validate product market fit without building the product and seeing if people will pay.

I built a dev tool that helps people jump-start React development projects (think boilerplate, but way more customizable). As soon as it hit $2k/month, where I could barely live off the revenue, I felt that was product market fit for me. It was solving a problem for some amount of people and I could continue to work on it full-time. Now doing ~$6k/month.

1. Do not trust your instincts alone.

2. Get beta testers. Relevant comments on hn and reddit will get you first 10-20.

3. Set up a channel for live communication with beta testers. Discord works fine these days and is free. Listen to what they have to say. Be polite and grateful.

4. Ask beta testers "How disappointed would you be if this product ceased to exist?" on a scale of 1 to 10. This will measure how much they care.

5. If your starting scores are low (avg 5-6 or below) or you fail to make it to this stage, you probably do not have product market fit. If you have 8+, by all means keep doing it.

Curious as to why you chose Discord? I’ve been invited to various product-focused Discord groups over the years and strongly disliked the experience. Way too much time sorting through channels just to follow along. I love Discord for gaming chat, but it is not ideally suited foe this use case…

It's not perfect but is still better than Slack, is free, and it so happens that my target market is in <30yo demographic so Discord is second nature to most of them (the gaming nature of it does still feel weird to me, but this is about making beta testers comfortable, not me)

Like many say, validation is basically questioning. 1. Is it useful to you, use it at least 5 times a week? 2. Does anyone else need it? 3. Have you tried the top 10 Google result websites? Are they bad? How better is yours? 4. Try to pitch to your target users through forums not ads.

No, I did not stop my day job to start a new side project or company. The only time I quit my job was the very first time, I started the project. Took 2 years to close it with no big success. And I realized I should have done that without quitting my full time. Since then, I built 6 side projects, never tried to monetize. The latest one was started with an intention to make money, doing good since day 2. Concentrate on SEO if you believe the top 10 Google results of your focus keyword are doing bad. Once you get into top 2, thats all!!

I am still in this process.

My first launch was here on Hacker News, but at that time it was a prototype with no way to register and log in. Interest was very good. Then launched on Product Hunt where I got my first 20 registered users. Beyond that it has been posting the animations created on 4chan and other social websites.

I usually iterate on the features, look n feel etc. Try an idea, see if it sticks. If it doesnt, then discard it. I also have Discord channels that users can get help or chat on.

The product is an animation editor with no code or formulas https://toonclip.com

Quite cool! Will try it out.

You need to get a landing page is. You don't have to say exactly what your product is if you don't want to give away details. But either way you must list the benefits.

Then get people to sign-up to a mailing list for the MVP (or beta) announcement. The numbers help to verify your idea.

See mine, which will help people with questions like this: https://cxo.industries/

I'm building a product now while I'm doing my day job. It's not yet sustainable yet, but I've been spending time on it constantly. It pays my rent, that itself is a huge thing for me.

I would not advise you to quit your job. You can quit your job when your side project makes money equal to your salary. Set that as a bench mark and work towards that. Good luck!

Most ppl can scrounge together an mvp and landing page, but software ppl hit a wall when validating. This is a major pain point as it requires networking (finding and connecting with potential customers) then pitching the mvp to them.

Has YC addressed this in a meaningful way?

Instead of guessing what other people may need, try creating a product that you need. Unless it’s super niche there are probably other people who need such a thing too.

My slight problem with that is I often have a problem say at work, but realise it is very specific to this job, this teams way of doing things. I feel that it’s worth asking around a bit before building anything.

The problem with that approach is that it's quite easy to make something you "need" that also isn't valuable to others. If the goal is to get paying customers, you also need signals that your solution is valuable enough to pay for.

My rule of thumb is make what you need in order to make what you needed.

My first SaaS failed even thought people really liked the idea I never managed to get a single paying customer. My second SaaS was something I needed but my market research showed barely any interest, especially as it had no free model. This SAAS organically grew to the point of living nicely from it. Maybe I am just bad at validating but I do think luck is a relatively important factor.

Can you work on side projects like this (commercials involved), with having day job? Does it violate your employer contract?

If it does, you have an abusive employer.

It's like being in love right? "You just know."

Startup School's biggest lesson has been "just launch and find out." You can wonder if you'll have product market fit forever, but you'll never know for sure until you have people paying for your product and telling their friends to sign up. It's by nature an ephemeral thing, startups are not yet a pure science.

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