Ask HN: How to Market Before Building?
Has anyone here did something like this with 0 audience ? Because it seems that this only works when you have like a 10K followers or a 5K community members
- Setup a Landing Page and collect Emails on a waitlist
- Blog Posts on relevant keywords/topics. Do 2-3 a month at the least. quality over quantity.
- Do Outbound sales. Find your potential customers using tools like Apollo, Linkedin etc. No easy way here. You have to grind a bit. Make a list. Reach out to them. Try to start a conversation
- Look on Reddit/sub-reddits in your area of interest. See if you can find potential customers there. One way is to reply to related topics and build authority. Takes time.
- Show some MVP/screenshots/mockups of the product to your potential audience on social media etc. Post it everywhere. Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook at the minimum. If B2C, may be even do Insta and TikTok
- Use Youtube as a channel. Create content in your niche.
All of these are hard to do and there is no magic wand for them. But you have to do these to have a chance especially in today's crowded market where every problem has 100s of solutions already in some form. Even harder challenge is that you won't have anyone to help in the beginning except may be a cofounder if you have one. Everything has to be done by you/cofounders.
In other words, if you can't figure out how to reach the customers before you have z product, you're not going to be able to figure it out after you have a product.
Since marketing is harder to figure out than code it makes sense to do that part first, not last.
Then if you fail to find the market, you haven't wasted time building the product.
To answer your question; A) identify the market. B) figure out where they hang out C) go there D) talk to them
You can't really do this with a Steam game; you'd need at least screenshots first.
If it's direct sales, you can do this with a powerpoint, as many have commented.
If it's via digital marketing, you can just test that they're clicking the ads. Or funnel them to a landing page where they click to buy or join a waitlist. Email marketing tends to convert very well to sales. If you can, you'd want to funnel everything into a squeeze page, where the only thing they can do is enter their email. Don't do it on a pop-up. You'll probably want to see where they're joining the waitlist from - is it under the hero banner, or the explanation, or the pricing page. This lets you know what they really care about.
This might be the old way of doing things though. More modern is to build a social media presence or get in front of someone else's and just propose something. If nobody is excited, then there's probably no market for it.
For example, if you're building a creator tool, spend 30 days publicly interviewing creators about their workflow headaches. Share insights generously. When people see you truly get their problems, they'll naturally want to know what you're building. I've seen this create waitlists of thousands before a single line of code was written.
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