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Comment by earksiinni | Hacker News Reader

You wrote elsewhere that you validate within the first four weeks. How exactly do you do that? What if you have no Twitter following or very little social media presence? How can you get people to listen to you and say yes/no?

I’ve tried micro startups in the past. I build a landing page, get Google AdWords, maybe put out a post on Reddit or HN, and then…nothing. No signups, no comments. Maybe I’ve just picked the wrong ideas, but I can’t even get people to say “this is bad.” Just silence.

Seems easier when you’ve already built some clout and have a following. But also seems like I’m doing something wrong.

Do you have a specific example of how you did it? A link that you can share?

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Not OP, but validating ideas is (relatively) easy. First, you figure out who will use your product. Then, you get a few of those people to use or discuss your product. You only need a few people, and they can be close acquaintances. After showing the product to a few people you imagine to use your product, you come to a determination of whether or not they liked your product. This part is a little subtle. You don't ask them "did you like my product?" Instead, you try to figure out if your product seems like something they were excited about, would continue to use, and, most importantly, tell others about.

Think about it like this. If you show the product to a handful of people that you imagine to be ideal users, and NONE of those people are excited enough about your business to share it with others, then what chance of success do you really have?

To give you a concrete example. I made an app that was a pretty revolutionary take on reading short stories. I had a few friends try it out, all of whom were passionate readers. They said they liked it, but I could see that none of them opened it again after their initial test. To me, that was all the signal I needed to pivot to something else.

> validating ideas is (relatively) easy

My experience has been totally different here.

We found people to be biased toward being polite. So we found "being excited" was a bad signal for what to build.

The best signals were when people offerred things that actually cost something e.g. reputation (by putting us in touch with important people), money or time (if they're people who valued their time highly).

We still haven't found any crazy level of growth though so maybe it is easy and we're just doing it wrong. Who knows.

The book "The Mom Test" written by Rob Fitzpatrick may help you with that. It presents ways to ask non-leading questions and understand the flow of discussion such that even your mom wouldn't be able to lie to you.

It's a short book without fluff, I recommend.

You have to decode what they say. Which is really hard because obviously working on the product yourself, you want to believe they care about your product.

For example: - "This is awesome! I would absolutely use this if it would just have this one extra feature it does not have now." --> I absolutely don't care about this product. Please leave me alone. I have better things to do.

> but I could see that none of them opened it again after their initial test.

I think OP agrees w/ you and this is their key point -- you can ignore everything they say and just look at how, or whether, they use it. More generally, I think it helps to try very hard to get at the underlying problems people have, and try to make those problems go away. People will use very terrible software (interfaces) if it solves a real problem for them. I think your signals are good generalizations to be clear, I just think we (all of us) regularly gloss over problems by focusing on tech, design, or otherwise "cool" things. It can be really hard to figure out what problems people actually have, and also whether they are significant enough to change their behavior to solve them better.

> NONE of those people are excited enough about your business to share it with others, then what chance of success do you really have?

Thanks for writing this.

If it would have been easy, we would probably have millions of micro-startup founders out there.

I have been doing customer discovery professionally for over 10 years as a sales person and PM and there is no 1 method or silver bullet to predict whether the product will be successful.

Talking to acquaintances is terrible, because they are biased (see MOM test). They will tell you all kind of stories, but ultimately what matters is:

Are they going to pay?

Excitement has nothing to do with revenue which in the end is the blood of a business.

To extend this - there is a patter now on Twitter where indie devs are selling to their twitter friends, but is it a viable business beyond that? I don't know.

What I do know is that the only way to validate a product is to get paid and the market will tell you the truth.

When I see a potential problem, see if I can solve it. See if it's already being solved, if not I pitch the idea to few people. If at least 50% got excited. I pick this idea to build.

You can find problems in your day to day life. Travelling is another way of discovering new problems. Every problem is not worth building a solution for. Only the burning ones with business potential.

> See if it's already being solved, if not I pitch the idea to few people.

And how do you find these 'few people' to pitch to? You would have to find the right people with skin in the game, who are actually impacted by this right? How do you do that? For me, this has always been the part I could never crack.

If you don't have first-hand contact with your potential users, and you don't know where they are, then you likely lack the empathy to build a great product for them.

For anyone scrolling by and getting sucker punched by halpert here, I'd like you to know that not being surrounded by people whose problems can be solved with software startups doesn't mean you 'lack empathy'.

I feel like 'and you don't know where they are' is maybe the redeeming phrase in halpert's post. If you have an idea that you think would help some people, and you have no idea where such people are concentrated... maybe it's a sign you don't know enough about said people to really be able to help them?

He did not say „lack empathy, making you a bad person“.

He said „lack empathy for building this particular type of software“, meaning you would not be getting enough emotional feedback (due to lack of connections).

I think boffinism's comment below hits it, but to also add -- its important to try and find a charitable interpretation of comments when possible. Here I think empathy was meant literally as understanding other people's needs and points of view. If you don't know people with some problem directly, and also don't know how to find them -- how sure are you that the problem you are solving is real and in need of a practical solution? You have to understand user needs very well to build a novel product that people want to use. Its not about software startups solving the worlds problems -- I think its just a very general point about solving problems you understand and not ones you don't have any experience with.

To give a more concrete example, I know of a successul life insurance company. It was started because the founders had a bad experience with purchasing life insurance. They then worked with (and as) life insurance agents to better understand the customer (and insurer's) needs. THEN they built a company, one solution at a time.

Even in the most charitable sense, it's still a worse-than-useless comment.

Q: I am having trouble with X; do you have any tips?

A: You are bad at X (but rephrased to make it sound like a character judgement).

Q: I am having trouble understanding why people think / do X A: You should talk to people who think / do X and ask them why they think / do X. Until you do so, you lack sufficient empathy to address their issues / change their behavior.

Its good feedback that it is worded in a way that has ambiguous meanings, one of which (you are a sociopath) is an unwelcome character judgement. But IMHO the charitable interpretation is perfectly practical and important feedback: Don't build products for users you can't talk to and learn from.

Posting on Reddit or HN is fine, but unlikely to be successful if that is all you do. Cold calling/emailing/linkedin and posting on forums like HN continuously can both help. The latter only works if your solution genuinely solves someone's problem otherwise it will come off spammy. If your solution has obvious keywords and those keywords aren't too expensive, then Google ads can be relatively cheap method to get started too.

I’m not OP, but a strategy I’ve seen on Hacker News in the past might be called ‘clout hijacking’, wherein you get a momentary boost from someone who has an established audience already. A popular Twitter user, a YouTuber, a newsletter author, etc.

The frugal way is to make something they genuinely want to share to their audience, but, for some, you can also just pay them.

Put ads before you have a product. Send people to a fake landing page when they click, just to see if there's interest at all.

Not the OP.

You can use gummysearch.com and launch a product that has already a customer base looking for using it.

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