A mistake that cost me $20K and 3 years, but taught me an important lesson.
I've made many mistakes in my 20-year entrepreneurial journey. During COVID times, I built several amazing (yep, truly amazing) products.
I had every product-launch checkbox ticked:
Beautiful UI, Great UX
Highly optimised code
Beautifully documented code
Every feature my users would demand on day 1
...and yet, no one cared. Heck, even the free users abandoned it. When I spoke with my potential users - they said it was a great product and signed up; but NEVER used it.
That's when I realised my mistake: I didn't validate the demand.
Market accepts products that solve a pain-point; and you need to validate the pain and the solution BEFORE you build your product.
It's funny how many my of my fellow founders make the same mistake. They get fascinated by cool tech-stack, build perfect product for months only to find that the world doesn't care.
So, how to validate your product idea?
Having failed multiple times; the only form of acceptable validation is people swiping their credit card for your software. Your long waitlists, cold promises from contacts don't count.
Go step by step:
MVP: An MVP is not a shitty, broken-ass product. It's a complete product but with a very limited feature set. It needs to have good UI and easy navigation. It should also solve the problem it promises to solve.
That's it. Don't complicate it. It's simple. Don't spend more than 2 weeks building your MVP.
Personal Network / PH / Reddit / LinkedIn : That's where your early customers are. Reach out to them personally. Try to get on call or request face to face meeting. If they buy from you - GREAT, if they don't - note down the feedback. Ask direct questions and get real feedback. Your friends will give you sugar-coated feedback. It doesn't help.
You should be able to validate your product in the first 45 days. Yeah, it's hard; but it's the right way.
If you are struggling; ask your question below. I'll be happy to help.
Replies
@eliza_pogorilska - unless there is a deadline we continue to stretch things. 45 days is a good time frame to launch a product and test if the market accepts it. In reality this will extend to 120 or more days.
Wow, I'm struggling with this exact challenge. I have an MVP for my product (took way longer than 2 weeks even though that's what I thought it would take initially).
Before building, I reached out to my personal network and sent a Google form with questions to validate whether the problem I was looking to solve actually needed solving. They can be my first initial users, but as you mention, they may sugar coat things.
Reddit... my god. Everyone thinks you're a spammer. I have not been able to find anyone willing to help and constantly find myself getting warned for asking, even though I'm trying my hardest not to be spammy. I'm assuming there's nuance to this that I'm missing.
I'm hoping I'll get better support here on Product Hunt, but again, I'm lurking first because I don't want to do something wrong and get banned.
If I had to ask a question, it would be: What's the best way to ask community members for help in a way that doesn't look like you're trying to sell them something off the bat?
The validation struggle is real when you're bootstrapped and don't have an existing audience. Any advice from founders who've been through this would be hugely appreciated.
@rohulp - Reddit is hard, but it's great for finding first customers. They'll give you feedback without sugarcoat. Help people, and initiate conversations - that's the way on Reddit.
Don't ask for help. Create value first and initiate a discussion. People know you've something to offer and that's why you're offering help. If you help people without expecting anything in return, they'll pay attention. Keep in mind that the real validation is someone swiping credit card for your product. Everything else is fluff.
Purposeful Poop
This is good content, thanks for posting.
Do you feel that some markets do just have "table stakes" features that you need to meet to be viable? Do you try to wedge into this space with some unique offering and the promise of the rest of the "Table stakes" features once you convince them you solve their primary pain?
@catt_marroll Glad you found it useful.
An MVP is a complete product; but with limited feature set. Let me explain.
We're building a community platform that allows businesses to build organic communities. This is a high-competition market. Our competitors have raised tens of millions of dollars and have been in the space for > 5 years.
Having used these platform for years, I knew what the problems were and wanted to address them. When I launched Jatra last year we had a very minimal feature-set:
Registration / Login
Central feed that showed Discussions + Articles (our USP)
Advanced SEO
We didn't have:
Profile customization
Channel customization
Direct messaging
Group chats
... and many features that are expected from a community platform. However, it solved the pain point for community builders who wanted to go beyond 'discussions' to keep members engaged and wanted organically growing communities.
To answer your question:
There's no set rule to determine what features to ship with. It's the decision founder(s) need to make. For example, do you really need 'dark mode'?
Yes, the table stakes features will eventually make it to the product; but only if they solve a pain-point for the customer. No one so far has asked for the features we didn't have.
The key is to understand that our users look at our product from different perspective than ours.
Love the honesty, and thanks for sharing what the experience taught you. I posted a similar thread about my startup failure.
We shared a couple of templates on our newsletter that touch on the same points:
Validate Your Idea in 5 Minutes for $0
How to Get Startup-Ready Insights from Reviews, Subreddits & Forums
@chaosandcoffee Good read!
@manu_goel2 I call it 'minimum lovable product'