Talking to people before building took me from failed projects to $9K in revenue

[felixheikka]

You’ve probably heard that you need to talk to your target audience before building, but I think you need to hear it again.

I’ve spent the last 11 months building projects with my brother, many of which failed, but one of them recently hit 4,900 users and $9,000 revenue in 6 months after launch.

My brother had previously built a business with his friends that was going well, but he wanted to try something new.

I was new to entrepreneurship.

For the first seven months of building together, our projects wouldn’t get any users or interest no matter how hard we tried marketing them.

We tried following so many different marketing guides but nothing worked.

It was only for the third project we realized we had to try something different this time.

So, we took the advice that everyone gives and I tried talking to people before building.

We found the subreddit of our target customers, did a simple post asking for feedback on our idea, and got positive responses.

This made building feel safer, and it gave us more confidence in our project.. what we didn’t expect though, was the OVERWHELMING response when launching.

Our MVP got 100 users in two weeks after launching. And I know that might not sound like a lot, but for us this was HUGE coming from months of getting no users at all.

When we went on to launch Buildpad on Product Hunt, we got 475 new users in 24h, and most exciting of all, we got our first paying customers after seven months of building.

This number would grow to 1,000+ users during the weeks post launch.

This was crazy to me.

Finally we had a product people were actually interested in.

AND they were paying for it.

I honestly think the success comes down to talking to people before building the product.

So, if there’s one thing to learn from our months of failures, it’s to talk to people before building your product.

I hope this can save someone from wasting months building a product that no one wants.

[novosel]

Did the feedback help in reformulating or refocusing you product in any way, or was the effect visibilty/promotion boost from the community?

[felixheikka → novosel]

It helped us a lot in narrowing down what the actual problem was. Getting confirmation from real people that the problem existed and what their feature requests and objections were also helped us a lot with the direction to take the product in.

[bdcravens]

Off-topic, but I feel like I'd find it easier to follow if you had used paragraphs instead of single double-spaced sentences.

[felixheikka → bdcravens]

Thanks for the feedback! I'm not used to writing on HN so it's good to know.

[pockmarked19]

Good for you, personally I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night building snake oil.

[bdcravens → pockmarked19]

I'm not understanding how they built "snake oil"

[pockmarked19 → bdcravens]

Look their product up, look at their story, and consider this joke:

"Do you want to be a millionaire? If so send me $10 and I'll send you the instructions."

Let me put it this way: if someone came to you and their story was that they could never figure out how to make money from investing and decided to make money from telling others how to invest instead, what would you think?

The glimmer of hope here is that they have customers, who will with any luck guide them to a real value.

[felixheikka → pockmarked19]

I prefer to look at reality here instead of an analogy.

The reality is that I get on calls with customers almost every week who tell me how Buildpad has helped them shape and build their products. Many of them are very happy with the help they get. We have multiple founders who have built and launched their products with Buildpad, and we have founders who have started earning money from their products built with Buildpad.

I find that this is more important than the story leading up to the creation of Buildpad.

Now, you're free to be skeptical of our approach, but as I mentioned, my brother has previous experience building a successful business.