Talking to people before building took me from failed projects to $9K in revenue

You’ve probably heard that you need to talk to your target audience before building, but I think you need to hear it again.

I’ve spent the last 11 months building projects with my brother, many of which failed, but one of them recently hit 4,900 users and $9,000 revenue in 6 months after launch.

My brother had previously built a business with his friends that was going well, but he wanted to try something new.

I was new to entrepreneurship.

For the first seven months of building together, our projects wouldn’t get any users or interest no matter how hard we tried marketing them.

We tried following so many different marketing guides but nothing worked.

It was only for the third project we realized we had to try something different this time.

So, we took the advice that everyone gives and I tried talking to people before building.

We found the subreddit of our target customers, did a simple post asking for feedback on our idea, and got positive responses.

This made building feel safer, and it gave us more confidence in our project.. what we didn’t expect though, was the OVERWHELMING response when launching.

Our MVP got 100 users in two weeks after launching. And I know that might not sound like a lot, but for us this was HUGE coming from months of getting no users at all.

When we went on to launch Buildpad on Product Hunt, we got 475 new users in 24h, and most exciting of all, we got our first paying customers after seven months of building.

This number would grow to 1,000+ users during the weeks post launch.

This was crazy to me.

Finally we had a product people were actually interested in.

AND they were paying for it.

I honestly think the success comes down to talking to people before building the product.

So, if there’s one thing to learn from our months of failures, it’s to talk to people before building your product.

I hope this can save someone from wasting months building a product that no one wants.