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Comment by jasonturley | Hacker News Reader

For quick user feedback, maybe give the product away for free in exchange for testimonials. Reach out to friends and family. Implement the changes they suggest. Once you have some solid testimonials built up, you can raise the price of the product. Rinse and repeat.

I recommend watching some Alex Hormozi videos on how to effectively market and sell.

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But where can I get the initial traffic? I don't even have any early users right now.

Product Hunt, paid ads, affiliates, emails, social media, niche market places, business journals, trade shows, newsletter placements, press releases, direct mail, business cards, local orgs and institutions, meetups, and free beer.

Absolutely, everything needs to start somewhere. The beginning is always the hardest part, but every small step counts!

What’s your product?

Thank you for your reply. I'm currently working on two projects: AI image generation and an image splitter.

Not related to your first submission on hacker news to git?

Personally, I would have to hire someone do to do sales/marketing.

Its just not an area I am going to be anything but bad in. I have many talents but sales/marketing is not one of them. Maybe you can learn to be good in this area but I have tried and it would be a mistake for me.

It’s true that it’s best to work with experts, but my personal project might not be that big. I’m thinking about putting in some effort to change it myself.

1) read “the mom test”

2) I hear that you scratched your own itch. When you had the itch/problem, what did you do to see if someone else had solved it before you started building? If you “only” did a quick google search, then you can try to rank for the phrase you searched for (which might be super hard). Did you post on Reddit/slack-group - if so, build a presence there so that when other people ask that same question, you can be there to help (and mention your solution)

3) try to meet people in real life who might have this same itch/problem, and talk to them

Okay, thanks for your reply! I'll give it some tries.

Start telling your story about why you built it in the first place. Tell it on any community that you think people who are in a similar need will be. Get narrow, try a few small niches. Stick with it for a month and then see who is following along. That is your audience. Start to tease out features based on outcomes that those people will achieve once they are helped by your product. Let your audience tell you what they want.

Paid ads, etc, will very likely not yield good results at this early stage because you don’t know your ideal customer profile well enough and no one knows you or your product well enough to trust you. This will build over time.

Thank you for your answers; I've learned a lot. I should summarize the purpose of my product and the development process, clearly outline the pain points it addresses, and promote it on various platforms. However, I'm a bit worried because those larger platforms may not be very friendly to new users, and it feels like the content I post might not get much visibility.

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