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Comment by gbelote | Hacker News Reader

One cool technique I saw recently (which isn't always applicable) is from a talk by Jason Cohen: http://vimeo.com/74338272 (around minute 7)

In a nutshell when he was building WPEngine he went to LinkedIn and found folks who were Wordpress consultants. He then sent them a follow email and said he's building a product for "folks like you and would love to talk to you about your pains, needs, etc" (customer development stuff) and offered to pay for their time. It worked well - he sent 40, 100% agreed to talk, actually talked to 38, and 0 asked for money. He suggests this worked so well because the offer to pay showed he was respectful of their time so they were happy to help. YMMV.

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You have a very good example for shooting against the target niche where you have your best audience to listen to you. But the question is: "when he was building WPEngine", there are already 40 folks "who were Wordpress consultants"? Then the result is not unexpected, and can not be consider a good example. Sorry if I misunderstood you. What we want know is how he got that 40 consultants to working on WPEngine in the first place.

WordPress was around for years before WPEngine started. There were thousands of WordPress consultants at that time, and he was building a WordPress hosting platform.

There were numerous WP consultants when he did this. They were his target customers. He interviewed them about their pain points and found that their pain was in line with what he had in mind for WPEngine (easy, fast, secure, no-friction hosting for WP) He asked them to write him a check at the end of the interview. BAM, customers. (I make this sound easier than it is..)

Oh, thank you both for your quick responses. So he really did a good job to solve the pains of his potential customers. Now the question becomes: how WP got so many consultants in the first place? But that's out of the scope of the parent posting, it still within the scope of the OP though, :)

Based on my experience, it's very hard for people to accept something new in the first place, for example, when WP was introduced. And this is still happening now. Once a group of people accept a new concept, building on top of it to improve the system is a little easier.

Well, arguably there was no established customer base for WPEngine before the launch. You either were a hobbyist and hosted for free on wordpress.com. Or you were a multi-billion dollar enterprise and used Automattic's premium hosting service (serious $$$).

OK. Thinking about it, there might have been a market there all along, but how come no one served it before? I mean Jason is crazy brilliant (talk to him, it's an experience!), but surely others could have come up with the same idea - right? I guess we'll never know, but my guess is that not too many people went out and searched for a thing like WPEngine before WPEngine

> how WP got so many consultants in the first place?

There are 75 million (!) WordPress sites in the world. It would be amazing if any software platform with 75 million users didn't have a large number of consultants available to help people with it.

http://en.wordpress.com/stats/

Thanks this is a great idea!

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