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Comment by codingdave | Hacker News Reader

You seem to have missed the key step. Talk to customers before you build. Build what they need. Then have them talk to you to adjust things until you really nailed down the product that solves their needs, and then have them talk to their friends about how much you rock.

Marketing comes later.

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Strong agree here. I'm a non-technical founder.

I tend to interview 30-50 people initially to find a gap in the market. If I'm into something (strong PMF), a good percentage of those people I interviewed will be future buyers.

I typically have cascading meetings for the following steps:

1 - is this 10X better than what currently exists

2 - does our prototype look 10X better

3 - does our v1 solve the gap we found

4 - what features do we need to build in order to get you to pay for it

5 - what features do we need to get you to refer us to 3 friends

A meeting for each of those goals typically leads to customers (again, if I've found PMF).

How do you usually find the people you interview?

My question exactly.

Also my question

I'm in sales. This is going to sound shallow and tautological, but you find the people to interview for Product Market Fit by looking for the people you THINK are the ideal customers.

If you can't find your target market, you might want to consider a different demographic that you understand better. Most successful startup founders started a business specifically to solve the problems they dealt with at their last job. They understand their product market fit because they ARE their target market.

Thanks, but I meant more in a tactical/practical sense. What channels do you tend to use to look for those people and contact them?

Depends on the audience, the not-so-technical marketing term for the concept is a "watering hole".

First step is guessing who your customers might be.

Yep, makes sense, have any good illustrative examples? Thanks for the term, though, makes it more googleable.

Tell me who you think your customers might be? Or ask ChatGPT what's a good watering hole for them, it will definitely come up with some reasonable guesses.

Was largely asking for all the people looking for specifics, since people were asking, and vague advice isn't very helpful when first starting out with this stuff. Like broadly, I've had luck with Linkedin messages for b2b and SEO for consumer, but mostly after the product is in an ok place. The initial users can be tough to find.

But sure, I'm working on things for parents/students, home buyers, and DIY heat pump installers.

Off the top of my head (don't expect any revelations here, but mostly for people wondering how to approach this type of thing for the first time):

* Parents/students hang out at schools and are probably a good referral/recommendation crowd

* Home buyers are looking for mortgage comparisons on Google (but that's probably a terrible strategy, since this is a highly lucrative segment to market to, so you should expect high customer acquisition costs)

* DIY heat pump installers will probably look at ads on /r/DIYHeatPumps

Thanks very much :-)

You can use a platform like Respondent to recruit extremely specific demographics. It's not cheap, but if you're strategic with your interview questions you can get really concrete directional signals with as few as five participants.

Ah very cool, thanks for the pointer!

That is great advice if you set out to build a profitable business on day one.

But it seems to me that there are many projects out there like mine. You start building something because it scratches an itch you have. You think it would be fun to build. You keep adding features and fine tuning the code because you want to see something work better and/or faster than anything else.

Then one day you look at it and say: "I wonder if other people will think this thing is as useful as I do (and be willing to pay something for it)?"

It might still be a work in progress, but it does a number of very useful things, so you now have to put on your marketing hat or team up with someone who is good at that.

Perhaps in the past. I think the approach now will be to vibe code multiple projects very quickly and see which one has traction even with a low quality product. You will get much better feedback than a discussion with a potential customer who may not even know what they want or have a false idea of what they want. You can always improve a product that has demand and abandon the ones that no one even downloads. Usage and payment are the real test if a product is worth doubling down on.

This might work to some degree if you can run your project by many eyeballs, but only if they aren't immediately made gun shy by interacting with a low quality product. A focus group environment would be good for this, but setting that up costs money.

This. I'd say it can only be deferred to after building _if_ you're building for yourself first in a space you're deeply experienced as the customer.

I've definitely been guilty of building first and hoping customers appear. Funny timing on this post though, because right now I'm actually in the middle of doing exactly what you're describing.

I flip this around.

Marketing comes first. Sales second. Product third.

The Microsoft approach

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