Comment by pkorzeniewski | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pkorzeniewski | Hacker News Reader

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Almost every guide for people wanting to build a product begins with one advice - find customers before you even have a product. I wonder how would you confront it with this story - more than 2k pre-signups and after launch almost no one is using it. Yes, he already built the product, but lets assume he didn't - having 2k pre-signups would convince anyone that the idea is good and worth investing time and money. Stories like this just proves my theory that the startup world is one big unknown. You can build a product without any research or marketing, some popular website or even a single person writes about it and suddenly your product is the next hot thing. You can also make a big research, advertise everywhere, collect thousands of potential customers who said "Sure, I would use it", but when you finally build and launch the product - no one is longer interested.

He didn't find customers. He found 2K looky-loos. Customers are people who are paying for the product (or meet some activity threshold in a free product). He found 2K people who were willing to give their email address to learn more about what was being offered.

That is a positive sign, but they aren't customers. It seems like 2,00 people logged in and then found out the product wasn't what they were expecting.

I know this was the case for me. I signed up hoping for a really nice online IDE. I found a bunch of ssh stuff that made no sense to me.

It might be worth talking to the 2000 people and finding out why they signed up and what type of product they were hoping to find.

That's the point - if you don't have a product, you can't sell it. You can collect e-mail addresses, people may say they're interested in your product, but until you build it and users pay for it, nothing is sure. That's why I find the whole advice "sell it first, then build" a bit silly.

Thanks for the input chaddeshon. I would love to chat with you about what you expected vs what you found, and what you would change.

Mind shooting me an email matt@mattkremer.com? Thanks!

I think all of those bits of advice that people give have some merit, but there is a large amount of uncertainty.

I think that software developers are like people and people are like herds of animals. They will move into a few areas and start grazing based on what the other animals are doing.

So you have flocking behavior that plays a large part.

Like the your product is a reef in the ocean, and the customers are schools of fish that come by.

Except this ocean has many more reefs than there are fish to populate them.

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