
Tips for rapidly iterating on your product when finding product-market fit - rglover
https://oncommand.io/blog/4-tips-for-rapidly-iterating-on-your-product-when-finding-product-market-fit
======
ChicagoDave
I just got off a 30 minute Zoom call with a marketing research guy and he
called this "Qualitative Research". Walk through your idea with 5 to 7 people
one at a time, improving each time. Do this _before_ you even write any code.
You'll save yourself a ton of time, though this is harder to do...because you
actually have to find people within your target market and induce them to work
with you. A $25 Amazon Gift Card might just be the trick.

Once you've iterated and your interviews tighten up, you know you're ready to
design and build.

Then you have to go through it all over again to validate it or pivot.

------
exacube
Key points:

* Learn to be ruthless about throwing away work

* Reduce your scope

* Use patterns and keep your code organized

* Build what people are asking for

~~~
GrumpyNl
This is so true, * Build what people are asking for.

~~~
achillesheels
And what is taken for granted is that it requires time and effort to get
people to ask. Meaning, go to market ASAP!

~~~
bob33212
I think this is where "Fake it until you make it" is a good idea.

If you have any product at all and a decent website you can hopefully at least
get people to talk to you and they will ask if your product can do X,Y,Z. Even
if your product is pretty basic you can at least tell them that you would like
to learn more about X,Y,Z so that you can build that and be ready to say yes
to the next potential customer who has the same question. This is probably a
better approach than calling up CEOs and asking "What are your problems?" They
have 1 million problems. You need to start with a MVP and ask what problems
they have which seems somewhat related to the MVP

~~~
achillesheels
Even "basic" can get muddled with hopefulness about product features which are
carts leading horses. To continue with the metaphor, chasing carrots before
the horse-cart even functions leads to half-baked software.

------
satyrnein
This is weirdly meta, a blog post about iterating a SaaS product that itself
is a tool for customers to manage iterating their own SaaS products. I look
forward to the next post about how his content marketing targeting likely
users on HN was successful!

As for the actual advice, most of it seems reasonable. However, I fear the
insistence on keeping code perfectly organized and the choice of fancy tools
might not be pure business pragmatism.

~~~
rileymat2
On the other hand, keeping the code well maintained and using fancy tools may
increase speed over many iterations.

