Ask HN: How do you find customers? And how do you find their pain points?

Things I say to my students (to ruin their lives): Never give up. You never really know which idea is the one that's going to fly. Like you, what I've learned is that I'm probably not the best judge. And let's face it, why would you trust others to tell you either? Much of it is luck alone. So it's a numbers game. Trust your gut. FWIW my collection of smart-sounding ten-a-penny platitudes from internet randos:

The world is full of genuine problems and people whose lives can be improved.

You're probably smart enough to solve at least one of them.

Having failed many times makes you an expert.

Great ideas are ten a penny. Implementations count.

Most people are trying to solve the wrong problems.

Pick a hard one that others would be too scared or embarrassed to touch.

Do not be seduced by technology. It's a tool, not an end.

Do not be seduced by business/money. It's an end, not a method.

Good fortune.

Don't try to look for customers. Look for problems in a domain you know something about. Treat "finding and connecting with people who have a common problem" the thing you are solving for.

4-5 steps later, they might become customers - but they will not be at first. Stop looking for customers, look for patterns in problems, then figure out where people with that type of problem hang out. Have conversations from The Mom Test.

4-5 steps later, they might become customers - but they will not be at first.

Exactly. Early on you are not selling, you are doing research. But nothing says you can't come back and sell to those early contacts once the time is right.

I'm not sure if you have, but I'd suggest listening to Pieter Levels and Courtland Allen on youtube. They each have several talks where they discuss this sort of thing. Pieter Levels actually walks through his process of identifying problems and building them into potential startups within a month timeframe. Courtland has a Micro Conf talk where he discusses the various stages of building startups.

Also, a great resource to learn how other people literally went from ideo to customer to profitable startup is the Indiehacker podcast. The first 200ish episodes are all interviews off this exact thing, plus IndieHackers has about 400+ written interviews of profitable startups by the founders that touch on this in many cases (IndieHackers is run by Courtland Allen)

I'd suggest you read The Four Steps to the Epiphany[1] by @sgblank, Mastering The Complex Sale[2], The Prime Solution[3], and Exceptional Selling[4] by Jeff Thull, and Customer Centric Selling[5] by Bosworth, Holland, and Visgatis. Across this sequence, especially the first two, I think you'll find a lot of very good suggestions on how to approach the situation you're talking about.

I don't know if I can put enough into a TL/DR; to even be useful, but the general gist of things starts with something like:

Have some kind of idea of approximately what you're interested in building, or what kind of problem you are interested in solving. If you're really starting from a complete blank slate, this might be tough. It doesn't need to be super detailed, but you should have something to start from. Otherwise you're asking people really airy questions like "What problems do you have?" that don't always work well as a starting point.

Talk to people in industry who you already know (Blank calls these "Friendly First Contacts") and ask questions around their experience in the area related to your vague notion of what you want to build / what kinds of problems you want to solve. Next, and perhaps most importantly of all... ask your "friendly first contacts" to refer you to other people that they think could give you useful insights, but who you don't already know. Repeat this process (and "the process" as laid out by Blank is fairly detailed, structured, and actionable. This is not hand-wavy mumbo jumbo. But you'll have to read the book(s) for the deep details).

As part of all this, you employ an iterative process of developing a detailed "problem hypothesis" which is simply a statement along the lines of "companies (or people) like you often have this problem, and would spend money to solve it." You then go back to your contacts (while also continually working to expand that pool of contacts, as you see fit) and try to validate / invalidate your hypothesis. If you can't validate your hypothesis, you start over and develop a new hypothesis. Once you have a problem hypothesis that you feel is validated (to some extent. This isn't really a totally binary thing) you develop a "solution hypothesis" which says "given that you have this problem, a product like the following would solve the problem and you would pay for it." And you keep iterating, talking to people, presenting your hypothesis, trying to validate/invalidate it, etc.

If it all works, at some point you have good reason to believe that you know something substantial about a real problem that real people have and a real (potential) solution for that problem that they would (theoretically) pay real $$$ for.

I'm eliding a lot of details, but somewhere in all this is where you build an MVP, show it to people you've talked to, and ask questions like "If I built this product would you pay a million dollars for it?" and "If I offered this product to you for free, would you install and use it immediately?" and others to help you hone in on just how real the interest and potential are.

Somewhere after this is where you start asking for either a check and signed purchase order (up until now you haven't been trying to sell anything), or at least something like a non-binding letter of intent that you can use to demonstrate the reality of interest in your solution if you're going to go out and try to raise outside capital, etc.

There's more to it than this of course. But at a super, super high level, that's sorta kinda how you can approach things. HTH.

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Four-Steps-Epiphany-Successful-Strate...

[2]: https://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Complex-Sale-Compete-Stakes...

[3]: https://www.amazon.com/Prime-Solution-Increase-Margins-Compl...

[4]: https://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Complex-Sale-Compete-Stakes...

[5]: https://www.amazon.com/CustomerCentric-Selling-Second-Michae...