> But is it possible you spend time building something without validating it's a solution people actually need and pay for?
Absolutely.
The service I provide is also available in a free form, but lacks some of the features I offer. It definitely is the case that those features I offer are - apparently - not as valuable as I had hoped for the target demographic.
If I were to do this whole thing again, I would probably lead with finding product market fit, rather than blindly building something and hoping for the best.
>May I ask how you figured out what products to build?
I built products that I wanted. That probably isn't a commercially optimal approach.
Probably better commercially to pick a market, embed yourself in that market and learn what they want. You might end up building something you are less interested in though.
>Did you stick to the same business domain, learned about their problems, and then built a product?
I have 3 products now. In each case I released something bare-bones that I thought was useful then iterated like crazy on user feedback. I didn't know that much about each domain when I started (but I do now!).
> I think any product can become valuable depending on how you market it to your targeted users.
Alright, not to be rude but this is a dead giveaway that you've never built a business or product before and you don't know what you're talking about.
I hate to call you out like this...I understand the sentiment you're trying to express, but any entrepreneur or product leader who looks at your comment will immediately know that it has no legs in reality.
This is not how any of this works.
Your follow-up is also a completely different argument than the one you initially presented.
> It's not the product, I strongly believe we have a decent product.
Belief is irrelevant. How do you validate the product offering with the target market? Are there really people who aren't freelancing now because this service isn't available?
Second, if you do believe in your product, why is the offering you highlighted focused on future features and future performance of your company to sell it? That would tell me, as a potential customer, that you don't believe the current product features justify the price. And if you don't seem to believe that, why should I think you'll be able to do anything in the future that would make future features or shares meaningful?
>>That's not my experience; I now avoid asking hypotheticals because the results for me have been very unreliable.
The point in this context is that, while it may still be unreliable, it would be more reliable than simply asking if they like your product. And it is the best you can do, since no one is going to actually pay for a product that doesn't exist yet.
> It's not the product, I strongly believe we have a decent product.
Check your dissonance. It’s the product.
There are numerous things I could pick holes in here, most noteably that the product tries to do far too much and probably doesn’t do one thing brilliantly. Personally I’m not going to invest my valuable time in finding out if that’s true. The ask is too big.
That said, nobody here is going to be able to give you a recipe for success. People are notoriously poor predictors of what will and won’t succeed in business. You’ve just got to work your way through this balancing intuition against feedback and data. It takes time, it takes money, and it’s really hard work.
> I would advise against wasting time building something you haven't validated with companies/people that are in the targeted market.
* You are right. This is why I'm looking for options/opinions about the best option to analyze a market (where I'm not in physically).
> create MVP and then actually invest a lot more into building it
* Thanks for your tips. I'm always developing an MVP so I can make a test with real users and understand how to improve or even if I'm the right market.
> The next big idea is to help connect the next 6 billion people to the Internet...and then he went on to say this is an exciting idea but may not be good business. Make of that comment what you will.
Someone is only a customer if they have money to spend on your product/service/widget.
> What was the problem with launching, and then deciding that design was the next priority and working on it while your product was running?
Great question, and one I asked myself when I was about 2 weeks into the redesign :-)
On reflection, basically no, you're right, there was no reason I couldn't have shipped and then improved the design in the meantime. The thing about it not being good enough for people to pay for was just my opinion - not tested with real customers.
> When you built this, did you validate the idea at all with people in your own network (or extended network) wether they wanted something like this?
Having worked in 'websites' for 9+ years, I spotted the pain points people had with various aspects of updating their website - paying an agency thousands to create/update a simple brochureware site, not being able to navigate various CMS's people put in place, etc. I spoke to multiple people in/out of my network and in my opinion, validated the idea.
> What (in terms of feedback) have you received from people you judge to be your target market?
Good question. I've had less feedback from my target market, vs. my network (designers, developers, etc). I think this is where I didn't do particularly well. I validated the idea with the target market, but in terms of ongoing feedback of the product, I didn't acquire that.
> When you say people don't convert, do you mean they don't even test the product or that they don't convert to a paying subscription?
They reach various phases of the sign up process. It goes: Email/password -> Auth with FB -> Pick FB Page. Then you go through to your Dashboard, where you can view your site online, or pick a new theme, etc. People got to various stages of this, with most people going right through to the Dashboard (a created site), but rarely deciding to pay.
> However, I am too embarrassed of how ragtag the device currently is to make more prototypes and sell them (literally held together by tape, string, and a prayer).
I work in software, so take this with the requisite grain of salt, but my first reaction to your post is:
Go ahead and start selling your ragtag device. Slap together a basic website + contact form + checkout page (figuratively held together by tape, string, and a prayer). Start posting about your device wherever interested parties gather on the internet. Be honest and transparent about how early you are in development and ask for feedback.
Even if nothing is sellable, you can at least gather contact info from interested parties.
Even if your device is total unsellable garbage and you sell 0 copies, you will learn so much from this process and the conversations with potential customers, and you can use that to steer your future development direction.
> ...because I have been working head down on the project.
Sounds like you are doing it right.
When I see a "landing page" collecting email addresses, I assume that there is no product, there is just someone doing some half-assed marketing. On the other hand, when a page shows an actual products, demos, and a way to create an account and start using the product, I'll take it seriously.
>Perhaps the reason I'm confident is because this little thing of mine managed to replace entrenched competitors in a few places. Why can't I do it again?
It's much harder to get people to pay you for a product than it is to convince them to use your product for free.
As a fellow founder, I wish you success, but I think you're assuming success based on things that don't really correlate with success from my experience running indie businesses for the last five years.
I've fallen into the exact same trap myself, so maybe I can save you some time.[0, 1] Before you have money safely in your bank account from real, paying customers, all the indicators you see are highly noisy.
Non-paying users can be a good sign, but they can also lead you astray. You could have 1,000 non-paying open-source users actively engaged with your product, and that does nothing for your business if none of them are willing to pay. You're better off finding 10 users willing to pay $40/month and letting their feedback guide your work.
I recommend testing customer's willingness to pay ASAP. If nobody's willing to pay for what you're offering, it's a sign that your product hypothesis was wrong and you need to gather more feedback about what customers want and pivot.
> the landing page is bad. copy is bad. pics are bad. design is bad. looks like a screenshot from trello. fix it.
I’m open to the possibility that a small team can produce a great product but have bad marketing, but there doesn’t appear to be a free trial to test it out. It’s not so much about the $5 but more about the friction of the sign up process. Even a live demo page would be good enough. Just something that serves as quick test drive.
My thought process is that I personally would like to see more products with a higher focus on being good for a smaller group of people, rather than cheaper and /or worse but aimed at a huge audience. [0]
Focusing on delivering a good product to a smaller audience allows you to have tighter feedback loops and create more useful iterations because of that. You can also usually charge more. Personally, there are a lot of product spaces that I currently prefer or would prefer spending more for higher quality. But I don't always get that option due to the obsession with casting a wide net, as it were.
Do I expect this to happen organically? No, market forces seem to heavily incentivize races to the bottom.
[0]: NB my use of relative statements and not absolutes. Going from one extreme to the other likely won't produce a net positive.
> It's not the product, I strongly believe we have a decent product.
You may be right... but there are a couple problems with that statement:
1) "Decent" isn't good enough. Aim higher.
2) You aren't going to deliver the best product to your audience if you go in defensively insisting that your product is fine. Listen to what people say, and be willing to build the product they want, not the one you think is best.
> The core idea of the app depends a lot on the experience and performance of the finished product, and customers have higher standards than we expected and they need integrations with lots of other services to know if it'll work for them
If this statement is true (in my experience, most statements like this are based on lack of proper analysis of one's business/product assumptions) then it sounds like you took an invalid business idea to begin with, then got hung up when you couldn't figure out a way to validate the invalid idea. Customers with high standards for a solution is a classic case of a weak problem or lack of real demand.
Absolutely.
The service I provide is also available in a free form, but lacks some of the features I offer. It definitely is the case that those features I offer are - apparently - not as valuable as I had hoped for the target demographic.
If I were to do this whole thing again, I would probably lead with finding product market fit, rather than blindly building something and hoping for the best.
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