What's most important for success in tech?
Hey Product Hunt community, I wanted to get your take on something that's been on my mind.
The other day, I was chatting with a founder who had poured years into building an amazing product, only to realise there wasn't a real market need. It made me wonder: as builders and enthusiasts, how can we avoid this trap?
I often hear that to succeed in tech, you just need a decent product and some funding. But I’m keen to discuss and gather insights from the community on the most critical elements for a tech company to thrive.
I've been considering three key areas:
Problem: How do we, as a community of builders, effectively validate whether a problem is worth solving? What are some go-to methods or red flags you look for?
Market: What are some proven strategies for building a profitable business model before investing heavily in product development? Have you seen creative approaches to monetisation that go beyond the obvious?
Attention: Beyond the usual paid ads and social media grind, what unconventional or memorable ways have you found to draw attention to your product or service?
keen to hear your thoughts, experiences, and hard-won lessons.
What's been your biggest "aha!" moment or face-palm when it comes to these three areas?
@shikhar_agrawal3 shipping means building.
if you keep building solutions no one needs... well you certainly can but that must be a very tough experience.
validating ideas without/before building is a smarter play, i reckon
@taniabell I agree, but at this time there is no certain way to validate your problem statement. Sure, you can take the Dropbox approach, but nowadays getting others to sign up for your waitlist is not such a clear indicator anymore. Maybe build a manual solution first (eg stripe team used to process payments manually in early stages) and once you see that enough people are using your product then we can engineer automated solutions and scale it further.
@shikhar_agrawal3 doing things manual behind the scenes is the way to go - throw together a sign-up/in page in like an hour and do everything manually behind the scenes to validate that there's demand.
if/when things start to break due to the demand then begin to build.
agree that signups aren't an indication of genuine interest these days.
This is such an important discussion. One of the biggest challenges I’ve seen is companies jumping into automation and AI without fully validating if their customers actually need it.
We spent a lot of time talking to businesses drowning in manual email workflows before deciding to build GoodGist—because while ‘AI automation’ sounds great, the real question was:
Would companies actually change their existing processes?
For us, market validation came from talking to potential customers and hearing the same frustrations over and over: We spend too much time manually extracting data from emails. That’s when we knew we had something worth solving.
Curious how do others here approach validation before committing to a build?
@goodgistai validation must come first.
tho there's a huge risk that SaaS founders will
either mis-read/understand what their interviewees say
OR fall victim to the confirmation bias.
these two are crucial to keep in mind during the validation stage.
I see so many SaaS founders spend their money and time building stuff before properly validating whether there's a market of the willing-to-pay customers.
it's the biggest waste (if you don't count the experience as a learning).
@taniabell Completely agree!
Validation is crucial, and we’ve seen how easy it is to misread customer feedback or build based on assumptions.
For GoodGist, we spent a lot of time talking to businesses drowning in email workflows, hearing the same pain points over and over before committing to building. One thing we’ve found useful is not just asking ‘Would you use this?’
but digging into actual workflows to see where automation can remove friction without disrupting existing habits.
Curious what approaches have you seen work best when validating willingness-to-pay early on?
@goodgistai the simplest way to validate willingness to pay is to ask them to pay a reasonable amount and see what the response is. the key here isn't to go in with a subscription when others pricing models can work.
Getting early traction without spending much on ads has always been a challenge. Content and community-driven growth have worked best for me
@jonny_vince personally I think you turn on ads once you've got some traction - you know that your solution works and for whom, then you bring in ads to scale what you've built.
love content marketing
Honestly, I think getting to market fast is what really matters. People often don’t realize they need something until they actually try it. That’s why launching early, listening to user feedback, and iterating quickly to drive organic growth is the key to success. Product Hunt is definitely one of the best places to attract early users!
@kay_arkain the danger is, tho, that you get to market ie build something that nobody wants. I'm in the camp that thinks that validating your concept without building is the way to go. so, you build once you've got a good feel that ppl want what you want to build.
@taniabellGreat questions, Tania! To avoid building without market need, I believe it’s crucial to validate early and often with user feedback. When it comes to market strategies, testing with MVPs and gathering pre-launch insights can save time and resources. For attention, creative partnerships or viral campaigns often outperform traditional ads. My biggest "aha!" moment was realizing that achieving product-market fit is more important than creating a perfect product.
@natalia_eiriz so very true - PMF beats a perfect product any day of the week.
because in SaaS we're not really building a product. we're building a biz that we hope will make us money.
thus:
PMF > product
In Nov 2023, my friend and I quit our jobs to start our founder journey. At that moment, we had a similar problem, we had dozens of ideas for products and services but didn’t know which one to pick first. It was quite frustrating at that moment, and we ended up wasting couple of weeks just deciding!!
Then we decided to create a simple questionnaire to evaluate and validate our ideas, and it worked for us😇
By answering these 9 questions, we were able to turn an idea into revenue in just 30 days.
Are people talking about the problem or looking for a solution?
Will people pay to solve this problem?
Who will be our primary customer?
Can we develop a solution that addresses the core problem within 2-3 days?
Will this solution add value either by saving time or money for the user?
How will we reach our primary customers to get feedback and first 10 sales?
How will we collect testimonials from early adopters?
What data do we need to track to gain insights?
How can we bring 1,000+ users to our website?
Let me share an example from our previous productized service where we submitted Black Friday deals on behalf of our users on multiple platforms to boost visibility and sales.
1. Are people talking about the problem or looking for a solution?
In November 2023, we started exploring ideas on Twitter. After a couple of days, we saw a trend where founders were actively discussing and submitting Black Friday deals on multiple platforms. This was our first validation that people were looking to list their deals on as many platforms as they can.
2. Will people pay to solve this problem?
We observed that finding platforms and submitting their deals would require some effort and time. Even if the platforms are known, each platform had different requirements, such as product details, logo size, pricing details, etc.
This will save at least 2+ hours of searching and submission time. Hence we assumed that people will be happy to pay for the Done For You submission service.
3. Who will be our primary customer?
Based on the research from the first question, we understood that our primary users will be founders who were sharing Black Friday discount codes on twitter.
4. Can we develop a solution that addresses the core problem within 2-3 days?
After brainstorming for a few hours, we came up with a solution which can go live quickly using no code tools. We quickly collected 15+ platforms in google sheet and created a landing page using softr in 2 days.
5. Will this solution add value either by saving time or money for the user?
From the answer to Question 2, we assumed that people would pay for it but this is where we need to validate our solution.
To increase the chances of success, we kept the process quick and simple. We created a simple form based on a generic field which we came up with based on different platform requirements. User can make a purchase and fill in the product details in 10 minutes. That’s it!
Further we added a 48 hours timeline which means we will submit the user's product on 15+ platforms in the next 48 hours of purchase.
To validate it quickly, we created early bird offers($5) for the first 10 users.
6. How will we reach our primary customers to get feedback and first 10 sales?
We didn't have much time as Black Friday was near, so for marketing, we did 3 things in 3 days:
Started engaging with founders on twitter who were sharing Black Friday Deals and recommended our solution wherever we felt it can add value.
DMed founders who were already looking for platforms or doing submission on such platforms.
Launched on Product Hunt.
And boom, our early slots were sold out in 72 hours. Then we added 10 more slots at $10 each, and they were gone too.
7. How will we collect testimonials from early adopters?
One way(and maybe the only one) to make a user happy is to overdeliver. We didn’t have much to over deliver at that point of time but we did it with quality, speed and more platform submissions. And voila, we got testimonial from our favorite founders Ayush with this process.
While the testimonial is important you should focus on feedback as well. That part will play an equal role in building a great product.
8. What data do we need to track to gain insights?
As our black friday deal submission service was relevant for only period of time, we didn’t focus much on data part but we still did napkin math on below things:
Number of people sharing the Black Friday deals on Twitter.
Number of Black Friday deals listing platforms (both free and paid).
Initial feedback from our early users to determine if they understand our offering. This helps in optimizing our landing page based on their input.
You can track more things as you go like website visitors, conversion rate, and different sources of acquisition.
9. How can we bring 1,000+ users to our website?
Unfortunately, we had to close the service as we had to submit 20+ products manually before Black Friday and also it was relevant for only a period of time. Hence, scaling to 1k users was out of question. This question will need its own article but in summary you should identify 1-2 primary acquisition channels and explore as many as you can.
After Black Friday Submission Service, we came up with a similar idea using the above questions and launched Boringlaunch in the end of November, 2023. We are currently focusing 100% on building and growing Boringlaunch where we submit AI startup on 100+ platforms to increase SEO score in 30 days.
PS: We answered these questions for building a productized service, but I guess they are pretty much valid if you are building a SaaS as well. I would love to know what you think about this and what kind of question you answer before launching a product.
@gamifykaran lots of lesson learned from this experience, I'm guessing.
good luck with your new venture
Ship as soon as you can; waiting to polish your product and only to realize it was never solving any real problem is fatal for early-stage teams with limited resources. Even if your product fails to get any users, you will eventually stumble upon a real problem as long as you keep iterating and shipping.