I solo founded a business and it just crossed 100K MRR (still solo). The trick is:
1. Don't give up after the first month of no traction, if you can get at least 1 customer at this stage that is a good sign.
2. Make contact with every customer you acquire, find out why they installed your product and what they want from it. Build any feature that they say is missing and offer the best customer support possible
3. Repeat this for a period of time. Once you have more customers the circumstances will change but this how you go from 0 -> 1 and get some runway IMO
Good advice. Do you think the part of point two about building every feature request might be a bit risky for some solo folks?
It’s easy to get carried away building every request, especially with early adopters who likely aren’t actually invested yet but may be excited about their own vision for it.
My personal experience is that too much of it leads to the product becoming a sort of shapeless, unwieldy ooze. Or perfect for one customer and few others. Some things can be tough to undo later too, so you might end up supporting them a lot longer than you’d like.
I agree there needs to be a way to fit it into the overall product direction. Solving these on a case-by-case basis is important and part of the job.
When I first started, getting customer reviews was my north star, so i would add any feature and hide them under "advanced" if they were ridiculously long-tail. Still worth it for the review and positive experience even if you hide the feature...
You've to go into founder mode - solve problems that exist for customers you've already discovered, rather than build something and expect magical "marketing" to find customers. The latter was previously a weak strategy, and is completely gone with the AI era. No alternative to working very closely with customers.
Honestly, I'm still not quite seeing how this fits into marketing. I get that we're focusing on our current customers, but how do we actually bring in new ones?
No magic pill: you can't work backwards. Pivot away from current idea if it's not getting word of mouth or any other traction, and for the next idea start with finding problems for people in your network that they will pay for.
Go looking for them wherever you think they might gather or hang out (online or in person). Reach out to those who seem like a good fit and ask them about the problem(s) they’re having that your product solves. Once you know if your product would actually solve it well for them, tell them about it in earnest.
If you’re doing that honestly, where they really have that problem and you actually have a good solution, you’d be a jerk not to lightly pitch it at that point.
You could probably do that up to 100 or so customers reasonably easily.
I used the shopify app store to get the first customers - i think an app store is still the way to go since they handle a lot of the customer outreach for you. that said, there are a lot of other ways to niche down - discord communities, subreddits, private boards, etc... come to mind as good places to start
So many people are victims of what I like to call the "Field of Dreams Fallacy."
Also known as: If you build it, they will come.
In the real world, it doesn't matter in the slightest if you build the best product in the history of the universe. If you don't have the proper marketing and sales pipelines, you will lose to the product that does.
There was a great article on here a while back about VHS and Betamax. While Betamax was better by nearly every metric, it lost.
Same for HD-DVD against BluRay. And for so many other great products that have died on the vine.
I think this is actually a bigger problem with society as a whole than people notice. The majority of people think that an idea alone is as valuable as a business. People regularly tell themselves that if they would have come up with X, Y, or Z, then they'd be rich and successful. When in reality, the product or idea doesn't equate to success in the slightest.
It's the same thing that I'm sure a lot of you in tech see, where people say "Can you make me an app?" or "We should start a tech company that does this one thing better than the other guy." And yet almost every single time I explain to them that there are 4,000,000 versions of their app already, and that it's still a business that requires significant effort, they act like it's my fault for not helping them or not believing in their idea.
I've let millions of better ideas fade from memory without a second thought. Because I've learned that operating a successful business is an entirely different world from building a cool thing. The idea is the easy part. Everything after it is the actual work.
> There was a great article on here a while back about VHS and Betamax. While Betamax was better by nearly every metric, it lost.
There is some nuance here.
Manufacturers didn't know if people preferred shorter, higher quality (Beta) or longer, less quality (VHS). That's partly why there were two formats.
Most people like to say VHS "won" but what it really won was the consumer market. Beta won the professional TV news market because it turns out news stations had a high demand for short, high quality video storage.
I point this out only to say that winning isn't a one dimensional/binary outcome. You can "lose" in one market but still be very profitable in another market.
"The idea is the easy part" is something I knew deep down but was too afraid to admit to myself. It's easier to keep building than to confront that everything after it is the actual work. Took me years and a few dead products to really accept that.
I feel like Im in the process of swallowing that pill.
>There was a great article on here a while back about VHS and Betamax. While Betamax was better by nearly every metric, it lost.
Not every measure. It could hold like half the recording as a VHS.
The “killer app” for video tapes was being able to record live TV when you weren’t home with timers on the players. VHS could record more without any intervention.
It also meant most movies could be watched all the way through without interruption.
People didn’t care about the ever so slightly better quality of Betamax. They cared about getting their moneys worth and not being interrupted.
What mattered was every other company got together and agreed on a format. The size of their market caused hollywood to release more movies in that format which made more people buy. The super long mode became more important later.
You seem to have missed the key step. Talk to customers before you build. Build what they need. Then have them talk to you to adjust things until you really nailed down the product that solves their needs, and then have them talk to their friends about how much you rock.
I tend to interview 30-50 people initially to find a gap in the market. If I'm into something (strong PMF), a good percentage of those people I interviewed will be future buyers.
I typically have cascading meetings for the following steps:
1 - is this 10X better than what currently exists
2 - does our prototype look 10X better
3 - does our v1 solve the gap we found
4 - what features do we need to build in order to get you to pay for it
5 - what features do we need to get you to refer us to 3 friends
A meeting for each of those goals typically leads to customers (again, if I've found PMF).
You can use a platform like Respondent to recruit extremely specific demographics. It's not cheap, but if you're strategic with your interview questions you can get really concrete directional signals with as few as five participants.
I'm in sales. This is going to sound shallow and tautological, but you find the people to interview for Product Market Fit by looking for the people you THINK are the ideal customers.
If you can't find your target market, you might want to consider a different demographic that you understand better. Most successful startup founders started a business specifically to solve the problems they dealt with at their last job. They understand their product market fit because they ARE their target market.
Tell me who you think your customers might be? Or ask ChatGPT what's a good watering hole for them, it will definitely come up with some reasonable guesses.
Was largely asking for all the people looking for specifics, since people were asking, and vague advice isn't very helpful when first starting out with this stuff. Like broadly, I've had luck with Linkedin messages for b2b and SEO for consumer, but mostly after the product is in an ok place. The initial users can be tough to find.
But sure, I'm working on things for parents/students, home buyers, and DIY heat pump installers.
Off the top of my head (don't expect any revelations here, but mostly for people wondering how to approach this type of thing for the first time):
* Parents/students hang out at schools and are probably a good referral/recommendation crowd
* Home buyers are looking for mortgage comparisons on Google (but that's probably a terrible strategy, since this is a highly lucrative segment to market to, so you should expect high customer acquisition costs)
* DIY heat pump installers will probably look at ads on /r/DIYHeatPumps
That is great advice if you set out to build a profitable business on day one.
But it seems to me that there are many projects out there like mine. You start building something because it scratches an itch you have. You think it would be fun to build. You keep adding features and fine tuning the code because you want to see something work better and/or faster than anything else.
Then one day you look at it and say: "I wonder if other people will think this thing is as useful as I do (and be willing to pay something for it)?"
It might still be a work in progress, but it does a number of very useful things, so you now have to put on your marketing hat or team up with someone who is good at that.
Perhaps in the past. I think the approach now will be to vibe code multiple projects very quickly and see which one has traction even with a low quality product. You will get much better feedback than a discussion with a potential customer who may not even know what they want or have a false idea of what they want. You can always improve a product that has demand and abandon the ones that no one even downloads. Usage and payment are the real test if a product is worth doubling down on.
This might work to some degree if you can run your project by many eyeballs, but only if they aren't immediately made gun shy by interacting with a low quality product. A focus group environment would be good for this, but setting that up costs money.
I've definitely been guilty of building first and hoping customers appear. Funny timing on this post though, because right now I'm actually in the middle of doing exactly what you're describing.
I found the only thing that reliably works is direct sales. Find people that could potentially use your product and message them. Find them in forums, chats, email, LinkedIn, wherever.
If I had something I was into or did and someone took the time to reach out to me to try to show me something they built in a personal way, I would definitely be receptive.
Online stuff is cheap. I built products, posted on Reddit and had literally thousands of people come to my site. Not one person bothered to go to the home page and ask "what is this product". And this was when there were a lot fewer bots and scrapers. No ones going to use your product because he saw some crap on TikTok. It's cheap engagement
Just like you, I developed a product and posted about it on Reddit, and received a ton of upvotes and comments in just over ten minutes. So I knew I was in the right place.
But then, moderators deleted my post cause they don't like promotion here.
I've tried X, youtube and other social medias. But it's like shouting in a crowded train station—no one can hear me.
So I think it's hard to harness the leverage of online marketing right from the start. Perhaps we should reach out to each customer one by one during the first phase.
Platform where technical founders post their live products and marketers pitch to join as co-founders or paid partners. Built it because I kept running into the exact problem in my post. Not live yet but close.
I think I am definitely gonna try the direct sales approach, to try and fill out the platform once its ready.
Unfortunately, being a developer, at least in my case, they don't teach us sales and marketing. Many people believe that if the product is good it will sale good, and get disappointed.
What I can add as an additional advice is that asking AI what to do does not help either. It can give good suggestions, and ideas on how to promote it, but the actual execution is a total disaster. For example, it says, show it in hacker news, but does not tell you how to do it, and because you don't know what to ask the AI, posting here just like that is a big fail. Same as Reddit, ProductHunt, BetaList, and all other other platforms.
Sometimes the AI can give really bad suggestions as well, like, pretend that you are not promoting it, but somewhere in the middle, try to add your things, so that it looks honest. PURE EVIL!
Marketing and promotion is totally different topic and the experience really matters! :)
It's as rough as it gets. You really have to know who your customer is. Not as a thesis, but as a proven. If you can find your exact customer base, you will get customers over and over again. There is one subreddit where I can post any time of the day and will have 50-100 new testers by the morning (and if it does extremely well then 10x those numbers). It's way more niche and specific for most products than people think, spamming X won't help build brand identity unless you are following and talking to your literal customer. Then persistance, persistance and more persistance. P.S I am an absolute amateur at this as well but just my experience.
As a builder/developer, marketing often isn't considered "fun". But you need to do it, else the build was for your personal entertainment/learning exp (which is sometimes a good thing).
What I do is stop building and focus 100% on marketing - well, 90% because I can't help myself. Even if this isn't as "fun", you need to switch modes and stop building.
As for my approach, I start with Google Ads + SEO/AEO. Google ads can get results in a few weeks (Google does have a learning phase) and SEO and AEO is a much longer process, which can be months before you see results. I use AHREF to check my SEO/AEO progress. While AHREF isn't a direct measurement of Google, I've found their DR to be correlated with my organic traffic.
The 90% is relatable, I physically cannot stop building even when I know I should be doing something else. The mode switching is the hardest part, not the marketing itself.
Good reminder that ads can show results fast while SEO compounds slowly, running both makes sense.
I brought on a high-touch salesperson on spec years ago and it did not work out. He and I were really successful at getting audiences with people but we never made the sales we were looking for and, worse, he lost me small cheap jobs that I could have sold myself. He'd probably say it was a product problem and he might have been right but later on I found out I wasn't the only person who had the same experience with him.
For some products you need those kind of skills. I've met people like him who really are worth their weight in gold.
For other products you need somebody who can make an Adwords campaign, analyzes the analytics, refine it and repeat. That kind of person can be worth their weight in gold too.
For this conversation to be productive you have to have some idea if you need one or the other or a bit of both.
If I may ask, was the product B2B or B2C and do you feel any particular advice which can be different for the two (B2B/B2C), I would love to hear your opinions on it.
I wish to ask you one thing but how do you start within B2B as in how do you get your first few customers, I feel like having the next becomes significantly easier somehow but I feel like its a very large mountain to cover for the first few customers, I would really like it if you can give me some guiding points on this for future and thanks for replying to me, I really appreciate it!
A lot of people who are successful in it can take advantage of connections they have in the industry to make the first few sales.
For instance when David Duffield got kicked out of Peoplesoft he went out and started Workday to make a competitive product and of course his name was well known in the industry so the skids were greased for him.
In a similar situation and I understand where you're coming from. Although I have not taken on a Marketing co-founder, I have had a number of important and revealing conversations that I've learned a lot from.
1. Make sure the market for your product exists before you make it. This is counterintuitive to builders like myself and probably you. building is what I'm good at, and I know what I'm making adds value, but that doesn't mean others will see that value.
2. Kinda goes with #1, but talk to as many people as possible in the market you are considering a product for and learn what their problems and pain points are so you can solve them. If you can relieve someone's pain, the marketing will do itself. It's hard to even get the conversations, but each one is helpful, even if it's telling you something you don't want to hear.
3. Focus on gaining external interest, not necessarily revenue. Again, hard, but a pilot or partnership with another startup or small business can go along way and showing value to future investors or customers.
4. Talk to and learn from other founders. Your already doing this, but there are nuggets of information that can help even if it's just a slight change of perspective.
5. Keep your head up. It's a slog and it's brutal, but it's a marathon.
I'm still working on all these things myself, so you're not alone. The realization that a good product without a market is nothing, was a big revelation for me (and in hindsight makes me feel like an idiot). I honestly thought if you solve a hard enough problem or built a good enough product that the rest would fall in line, but that was not the case, but I'm not ready to give up yet.
Its really tough as a techincal guy. Coding and building product is the easiest part actually, Hard is to distribute and market. Many people here are suggesting talking to people if they really need what you built. This is really true, but even when you build something which people might wanna use, I still find it hard to distribute and market.
I mostly get traction from the reddit but that's it. I am not even allow to post here on HN. I know what I've built is useful, but I do not even know how to pitch it correctly, or where to market it apart from reddit.
When bootstrapping something, marketing is about finding distribution channels that work for you. Looks like you never found such distribution channels, learn and keep grinding on that, organic and tik tok dancing is not the only game in town. I do everything from tech to sales, marketing and support for my company based of my oss work: Filestash (https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash). For my business, the most important channel is SEO and particularly creating online tools to get people to interact with the product so if you search for "online ftp client", "online s3 browser" you will inevitably found my product. That's the top of the funnel, the cold traffic and the goal is then to transform that onto paid customers. For me, I make calls with users, try to understand their problem and fix it for them. In practice it's a lot tougher than it looks because with AI less and less people are / will pay for software
The SEO + free tools as a funnel is something I hadn't thought about before.
Not universal for every product but for the right one it's a really clean distribution channel that compounds over time. The "make calls with users" part is universal though, that's the one I keep avoiding and probably shouldn't.
I guess the question is who is your customer or more specifically who's your buyer, who's your user and where do they hang out ? Also how do people find out about you product ? Distribution takes time, so I think its important to gauge interest upfront rather than commit to building first.
In general, the answer usually is to find people in your own network. If you go by that funnel the first thing you need is a network. LI is great at this. The next thing is to see who in your network is worth talking to. Find out whether the pain-point that you recognized resonates with them. A LI blast to your network might work as well to give you a bit of credibility. One thing that is cited often that does NOT work is spamming people asking for their time to learn about a problem. Nobody ever got back to me wit this method. But asking people in your own network for warm intros almost always works.
How about this counter offer? I give you 50% of the revenue for any sale you make for https://seaquel.app. If you tell me we need a lifetime offer, consider it done.
I've always relied on Google Ads and eventually SEO for my SaaS products. For SEO, I've had good success with having the landing page be an unauthenticated version of the app itself (modified to include SEO friendly text), allowing the users to immediately start using a limited version of the app which eventually prompts for signup. After signup, any data from the landing page shell gets pushed into their account.
This significantly reduces bounce rate compared to a traditional landing page and I've had good success getting to the top of popular search terms after a few months/years.
Jobs and Wozniak proved (at least in the 70s) that a great technical founder could team up with a brilliant marketer and build a huge company from next to nothing.
I seriously wonder if that can happen today. As a technical founder, I have tried to find a marketing partner for years. Every time it has failed miserably as each one proved unable to move the needle.
In my case, it could be the product, but I wonder who has seen success in this day and age.
This is exactly the problem I've been sitting with for some time now. Every platform I tried to find a marketing partner on was either dead, full of bots, or just a generic co-founder matching app with no real skin in the game.
I'm actually building something about this, would love to stay in touch and share it with you when it's live. Might be exactly what you've been looking for.
I once knew a guy who was disabled and walked on crutches. Jobs got mad at him for being late to a meeting, and the guy replied "well someone parked in the handicapped parking spot, and it took me awhile to walk from a normal parking spot.
No joke, Jobs looks him (a disabled person) directly in the eye, and says "oh, that was me; I think the country built an excess of disabled parking spaces after WW2." To the disabled guy!!!
I don't really know the answer you are looking for. I think it's different from one product to the next. I haven't managed to gain massive traction from the things I've built so far, but one thing I'm doing differently this time is treating marketing like the gym. I mean, don't expect overnight results, but make a consistent plan and continue to implement it over months and years not weeks and days.
ETA: based on your profile you started March 20 but in 2025 and your domain name expired. Did you build a product that has a fixed cost to remain live? I found your video, your YT seems popular. You can make a free website with GitHub pages and point your URL at that at least. Keep persisting, you can do it.
Think of marketing as "letting people who might use/buy your product that it exists."
You can't buy it if you have no idea it exists, right?
So how do you get the word out to the potential duatomers? You can read traction (the book), or just ask gemini/perplexity where you should advertise to find them.
depending on product, I've been using Claude code to do market analysis. I'm quite surprised at how good it has been. I'm not sure how well it works in general, but for Agriculture (which we target) there is a LOT of information out there so analyzing market segments is pretty good.
> Every single one followed the same pattern: build, post, get 12 likes from friends, a bit of organic traction, then nothing.
> I know I need marketing help but giving equity to someone I met online feels like a huge risk.
No offense, but your equity, from your own admission, is literally worthless. If someone decides to help you out for your equity, you should be jumping for joy. Most likely you need to pay out of your pocket, but if you're not willing to risk your own capital, then how can you expect others to risk theirs?
On one particular project I started by "spamming" relevant interest based forums. Luckily I was a member of said forums for quite a while before I have released my first version. It was about 13 years ago. Strategy had worked and then I got CEO as a partner along with some investment so I no longer had to do it
You take off your solo technical founder pants and put on your solo marketing founder hat.
In business, selling is much much much more important than making because if you have money you can hire technical workers. But nobody will care nearly as much about survival as you.
And if you have a technical background you are much more likely to have technical people in your network. Good luck.
Most of them are down honestly, which kind of proves the point of my post.
Ourbit (ourbitapp.com) is still a work in progress (wrapping up the demo/assetes/characters).
BuzzBench is down but the repo is open and there's a demo video if you want to see what it did: github.com/LazarKap/buzzbench / https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yAnbZMoQvmQ.
Building something new right now that's directly about this problem, will share when it's live.
I must say you have very strong skills. I also build something but planning to kill it. Now not planning to build anything as almost all the spaces are saturated. Do not stop, good luck
honestly the thing that worked best for me was just writing about the problem i was solving, not the product. like a dev.to post about why server side processing is unnecessary for most dev utility tools got way more traction than any "hey check out my thing" post ever did. people engage with the take, then they find the tool naturally. also reddit > twitter for early stage imo, the subreddits are way more targeted
> Most of us, when we want to ship a product, we start at the beginning and with the most obvious ingredient: the product. Because when you can create, the act of creating feels most natural and straightforward. But it makes it so easy to end up with a product that nobody wants to buy. And isn't that every new entrepreneur's worst nightmare? All that work, and nobody cares.
I solo founded a business and it just crossed 100K MRR (still solo). The trick is:
1. Don't give up after the first month of no traction, if you can get at least 1 customer at this stage that is a good sign.
2. Make contact with every customer you acquire, find out why they installed your product and what they want from it. Build any feature that they say is missing and offer the best customer support possible
3. Repeat this for a period of time. Once you have more customers the circumstances will change but this how you go from 0 -> 1 and get some runway IMO
Good advice. Do you think the part of point two about building every feature request might be a bit risky for some solo folks?
It’s easy to get carried away building every request, especially with early adopters who likely aren’t actually invested yet but may be excited about their own vision for it.
My personal experience is that too much of it leads to the product becoming a sort of shapeless, unwieldy ooze. Or perfect for one customer and few others. Some things can be tough to undo later too, so you might end up supporting them a lot longer than you’d like.
I agree there needs to be a way to fit it into the overall product direction. Solving these on a case-by-case basis is important and part of the job.
When I first started, getting customer reviews was my north star, so i would add any feature and hide them under "advanced" if they were ridiculously long-tail. Still worth it for the review and positive experience even if you hide the feature...
How do you know what feature request to add, then? The ones suggested by multiple users independently?
This hit at the right time.
I just launched something and the first few days have been quiet. Reading this made me decide to keep going.
Point 1 especially. Thank you.
100K MRR solo is insane, congrats.
I think the "Make contact with every customer" hits hard here. I think a bunch of people forget they you talk to people more.
Nothing to say, great advice.
Underrated advice here.
yeah but how to get new customers
You've to go into founder mode - solve problems that exist for customers you've already discovered, rather than build something and expect magical "marketing" to find customers. The latter was previously a weak strategy, and is completely gone with the AI era. No alternative to working very closely with customers.
Honestly, I'm still not quite seeing how this fits into marketing. I get that we're focusing on our current customers, but how do we actually bring in new ones?
No magic pill: you can't work backwards. Pivot away from current idea if it's not getting word of mouth or any other traction, and for the next idea start with finding problems for people in your network that they will pay for.
Go looking for them wherever you think they might gather or hang out (online or in person). Reach out to those who seem like a good fit and ask them about the problem(s) they’re having that your product solves. Once you know if your product would actually solve it well for them, tell them about it in earnest.
If you’re doing that honestly, where they really have that problem and you actually have a good solution, you’d be a jerk not to lightly pitch it at that point.
You could probably do that up to 100 or so customers reasonably easily.
I used the shopify app store to get the first customers - i think an app store is still the way to go since they handle a lot of the customer outreach for you. that said, there are a lot of other ways to niche down - discord communities, subreddits, private boards, etc... come to mind as good places to start
So many people are victims of what I like to call the "Field of Dreams Fallacy."
Also known as: If you build it, they will come.
In the real world, it doesn't matter in the slightest if you build the best product in the history of the universe. If you don't have the proper marketing and sales pipelines, you will lose to the product that does.
There was a great article on here a while back about VHS and Betamax. While Betamax was better by nearly every metric, it lost.
Same for HD-DVD against BluRay. And for so many other great products that have died on the vine.
I think this is actually a bigger problem with society as a whole than people notice. The majority of people think that an idea alone is as valuable as a business. People regularly tell themselves that if they would have come up with X, Y, or Z, then they'd be rich and successful. When in reality, the product or idea doesn't equate to success in the slightest.
It's the same thing that I'm sure a lot of you in tech see, where people say "Can you make me an app?" or "We should start a tech company that does this one thing better than the other guy." And yet almost every single time I explain to them that there are 4,000,000 versions of their app already, and that it's still a business that requires significant effort, they act like it's my fault for not helping them or not believing in their idea.
I've let millions of better ideas fade from memory without a second thought. Because I've learned that operating a successful business is an entirely different world from building a cool thing. The idea is the easy part. Everything after it is the actual work.
> There was a great article on here a while back about VHS and Betamax. While Betamax was better by nearly every metric, it lost.
There is some nuance here.
Manufacturers didn't know if people preferred shorter, higher quality (Beta) or longer, less quality (VHS). That's partly why there were two formats.
Most people like to say VHS "won" but what it really won was the consumer market. Beta won the professional TV news market because it turns out news stations had a high demand for short, high quality video storage.
I point this out only to say that winning isn't a one dimensional/binary outcome. You can "lose" in one market but still be very profitable in another market.
"The idea is the easy part" is something I knew deep down but was too afraid to admit to myself. It's easier to keep building than to confront that everything after it is the actual work. Took me years and a few dead products to really accept that.
I feel like Im in the process of swallowing that pill.
>There was a great article on here a while back about VHS and Betamax. While Betamax was better by nearly every metric, it lost.
Not every measure. It could hold like half the recording as a VHS.
The “killer app” for video tapes was being able to record live TV when you weren’t home with timers on the players. VHS could record more without any intervention.
It also meant most movies could be watched all the way through without interruption.
People didn’t care about the ever so slightly better quality of Betamax. They cared about getting their moneys worth and not being interrupted.
That’s why VHS won.
What mattered was every other company got together and agreed on a format. The size of their market caused hollywood to release more movies in that format which made more people buy. The super long mode became more important later.
You seem to have missed the key step. Talk to customers before you build. Build what they need. Then have them talk to you to adjust things until you really nailed down the product that solves their needs, and then have them talk to their friends about how much you rock.
Marketing comes later.
Strong agree here. I'm a non-technical founder.
I tend to interview 30-50 people initially to find a gap in the market. If I'm into something (strong PMF), a good percentage of those people I interviewed will be future buyers.
I typically have cascading meetings for the following steps:
1 - is this 10X better than what currently exists
2 - does our prototype look 10X better
3 - does our v1 solve the gap we found
4 - what features do we need to build in order to get you to pay for it
5 - what features do we need to get you to refer us to 3 friends
A meeting for each of those goals typically leads to customers (again, if I've found PMF).
How do you usually find the people you interview?
You can use a platform like Respondent to recruit extremely specific demographics. It's not cheap, but if you're strategic with your interview questions you can get really concrete directional signals with as few as five participants.
Ah very cool, thanks for the pointer!
I'm in sales. This is going to sound shallow and tautological, but you find the people to interview for Product Market Fit by looking for the people you THINK are the ideal customers.
If you can't find your target market, you might want to consider a different demographic that you understand better. Most successful startup founders started a business specifically to solve the problems they dealt with at their last job. They understand their product market fit because they ARE their target market.
Thanks, but I meant more in a tactical/practical sense. What channels do you tend to use to look for those people and contact them?
Depends on the audience, the not-so-technical marketing term for the concept is a "watering hole".
First step is guessing who your customers might be.
Yep, makes sense, have any good illustrative examples? Thanks for the term, though, makes it more googleable.
Tell me who you think your customers might be? Or ask ChatGPT what's a good watering hole for them, it will definitely come up with some reasonable guesses.
Was largely asking for all the people looking for specifics, since people were asking, and vague advice isn't very helpful when first starting out with this stuff. Like broadly, I've had luck with Linkedin messages for b2b and SEO for consumer, but mostly after the product is in an ok place. The initial users can be tough to find.
But sure, I'm working on things for parents/students, home buyers, and DIY heat pump installers.
Off the top of my head (don't expect any revelations here, but mostly for people wondering how to approach this type of thing for the first time):
* Parents/students hang out at schools and are probably a good referral/recommendation crowd
* Home buyers are looking for mortgage comparisons on Google (but that's probably a terrible strategy, since this is a highly lucrative segment to market to, so you should expect high customer acquisition costs)
* DIY heat pump installers will probably look at ads on /r/DIYHeatPumps
Thanks very much :-)
My question exactly.
Also my question
That is great advice if you set out to build a profitable business on day one.
But it seems to me that there are many projects out there like mine. You start building something because it scratches an itch you have. You think it would be fun to build. You keep adding features and fine tuning the code because you want to see something work better and/or faster than anything else.
Then one day you look at it and say: "I wonder if other people will think this thing is as useful as I do (and be willing to pay something for it)?"
It might still be a work in progress, but it does a number of very useful things, so you now have to put on your marketing hat or team up with someone who is good at that.
Perhaps in the past. I think the approach now will be to vibe code multiple projects very quickly and see which one has traction even with a low quality product. You will get much better feedback than a discussion with a potential customer who may not even know what they want or have a false idea of what they want. You can always improve a product that has demand and abandon the ones that no one even downloads. Usage and payment are the real test if a product is worth doubling down on.
This might work to some degree if you can run your project by many eyeballs, but only if they aren't immediately made gun shy by interacting with a low quality product. A focus group environment would be good for this, but setting that up costs money.
I've definitely been guilty of building first and hoping customers appear. Funny timing on this post though, because right now I'm actually in the middle of doing exactly what you're describing.
I flip this around.
Marketing comes first. Sales second. Product third.
The Microsoft approach
You don't have to go Tiktok or Instagram. Even email, niche forums or tiny add test can tell you a lot.You want someone who's small and iterating.
What's the product?
I found the only thing that reliably works is direct sales. Find people that could potentially use your product and message them. Find them in forums, chats, email, LinkedIn, wherever.
If I had something I was into or did and someone took the time to reach out to me to try to show me something they built in a personal way, I would definitely be receptive.
Online stuff is cheap. I built products, posted on Reddit and had literally thousands of people come to my site. Not one person bothered to go to the home page and ask "what is this product". And this was when there were a lot fewer bots and scrapers. No ones going to use your product because he saw some crap on TikTok. It's cheap engagement
Agree. But I'd like to add one more thing.
Just like you, I developed a product and posted about it on Reddit, and received a ton of upvotes and comments in just over ten minutes. So I knew I was in the right place.
But then, moderators deleted my post cause they don't like promotion here.
I've tried X, youtube and other social medias. But it's like shouting in a crowded train station—no one can hear me.
So I think it's hard to harness the leverage of online marketing right from the start. Perhaps we should reach out to each customer one by one during the first phase.
Platform where technical founders post their live products and marketers pitch to join as co-founders or paid partners. Built it because I kept running into the exact problem in my post. Not live yet but close.
I think I am definitely gonna try the direct sales approach, to try and fill out the platform once its ready.
> No ones going to use your product because he saw some crap on TikTok. It's cheap engagement
If your product is a wellness product or app, that's like catnip for a TikTok influencer. If it's a B2B SaaS, probably the opposite.
All I want to add here is, if you are shy or scared of being "cringe", this path is NOT for you.
Someone actually recommended to be absolutely "shameless" when it comes to speaking about what you are doing i.e. marketing your product/service.
Unfortunately, being a developer, at least in my case, they don't teach us sales and marketing. Many people believe that if the product is good it will sale good, and get disappointed.
What I can add as an additional advice is that asking AI what to do does not help either. It can give good suggestions, and ideas on how to promote it, but the actual execution is a total disaster. For example, it says, show it in hacker news, but does not tell you how to do it, and because you don't know what to ask the AI, posting here just like that is a big fail. Same as Reddit, ProductHunt, BetaList, and all other other platforms.
Sometimes the AI can give really bad suggestions as well, like, pretend that you are not promoting it, but somewhere in the middle, try to add your things, so that it looks honest. PURE EVIL!
Marketing and promotion is totally different topic and the experience really matters! :)
It's as rough as it gets. You really have to know who your customer is. Not as a thesis, but as a proven. If you can find your exact customer base, you will get customers over and over again. There is one subreddit where I can post any time of the day and will have 50-100 new testers by the morning (and if it does extremely well then 10x those numbers). It's way more niche and specific for most products than people think, spamming X won't help build brand identity unless you are following and talking to your literal customer. Then persistance, persistance and more persistance. P.S I am an absolute amateur at this as well but just my experience.
As a builder/developer, marketing often isn't considered "fun". But you need to do it, else the build was for your personal entertainment/learning exp (which is sometimes a good thing).
What I do is stop building and focus 100% on marketing - well, 90% because I can't help myself. Even if this isn't as "fun", you need to switch modes and stop building.
As for my approach, I start with Google Ads + SEO/AEO. Google ads can get results in a few weeks (Google does have a learning phase) and SEO and AEO is a much longer process, which can be months before you see results. I use AHREF to check my SEO/AEO progress. While AHREF isn't a direct measurement of Google, I've found their DR to be correlated with my organic traffic.
The 90% is relatable, I physically cannot stop building even when I know I should be doing something else. The mode switching is the hardest part, not the marketing itself.
Good reminder that ads can show results fast while SEO compounds slowly, running both makes sense.
Marketing can be a lot of different things.
I brought on a high-touch salesperson on spec years ago and it did not work out. He and I were really successful at getting audiences with people but we never made the sales we were looking for and, worse, he lost me small cheap jobs that I could have sold myself. He'd probably say it was a product problem and he might have been right but later on I found out I wasn't the only person who had the same experience with him.
For some products you need those kind of skills. I've met people like him who really are worth their weight in gold.
For other products you need somebody who can make an Adwords campaign, analyzes the analytics, refine it and repeat. That kind of person can be worth their weight in gold too.
For this conversation to be productive you have to have some idea if you need one or the other or a bit of both.
If I may ask, was the product B2B or B2C and do you feel any particular advice which can be different for the two (B2B/B2C), I would love to hear your opinions on it.
B2B with a high level of customization. Sales would have been very high touch and not all on the run ads, sleep, repeat model you see in B2C.
I wish to ask you one thing but how do you start within B2B as in how do you get your first few customers, I feel like having the next becomes significantly easier somehow but I feel like its a very large mountain to cover for the first few customers, I would really like it if you can give me some guiding points on this for future and thanks for replying to me, I really appreciate it!
A lot of people who are successful in it can take advantage of connections they have in the industry to make the first few sales.
For instance when David Duffield got kicked out of Peoplesoft he went out and started Workday to make a competitive product and of course his name was well known in the industry so the skids were greased for him.
See also this legendary story: https://www.marketingmonk.so/p/salesforce-grit-to-giant-mark...
In a similar situation and I understand where you're coming from. Although I have not taken on a Marketing co-founder, I have had a number of important and revealing conversations that I've learned a lot from.
1. Make sure the market for your product exists before you make it. This is counterintuitive to builders like myself and probably you. building is what I'm good at, and I know what I'm making adds value, but that doesn't mean others will see that value.
2. Kinda goes with #1, but talk to as many people as possible in the market you are considering a product for and learn what their problems and pain points are so you can solve them. If you can relieve someone's pain, the marketing will do itself. It's hard to even get the conversations, but each one is helpful, even if it's telling you something you don't want to hear.
3. Focus on gaining external interest, not necessarily revenue. Again, hard, but a pilot or partnership with another startup or small business can go along way and showing value to future investors or customers.
4. Talk to and learn from other founders. Your already doing this, but there are nuggets of information that can help even if it's just a slight change of perspective.
5. Keep your head up. It's a slog and it's brutal, but it's a marathon.
I'm still working on all these things myself, so you're not alone. The realization that a good product without a market is nothing, was a big revelation for me (and in hindsight makes me feel like an idiot). I honestly thought if you solve a hard enough problem or built a good enough product that the rest would fall in line, but that was not the case, but I'm not ready to give up yet.
Its really tough as a techincal guy. Coding and building product is the easiest part actually, Hard is to distribute and market. Many people here are suggesting talking to people if they really need what you built. This is really true, but even when you build something which people might wanna use, I still find it hard to distribute and market. I mostly get traction from the reddit but that's it. I am not even allow to post here on HN. I know what I've built is useful, but I do not even know how to pitch it correctly, or where to market it apart from reddit.
When bootstrapping something, marketing is about finding distribution channels that work for you. Looks like you never found such distribution channels, learn and keep grinding on that, organic and tik tok dancing is not the only game in town. I do everything from tech to sales, marketing and support for my company based of my oss work: Filestash (https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash). For my business, the most important channel is SEO and particularly creating online tools to get people to interact with the product so if you search for "online ftp client", "online s3 browser" you will inevitably found my product. That's the top of the funnel, the cold traffic and the goal is then to transform that onto paid customers. For me, I make calls with users, try to understand their problem and fix it for them. In practice it's a lot tougher than it looks because with AI less and less people are / will pay for software
The SEO + free tools as a funnel is something I hadn't thought about before.
Not universal for every product but for the right one it's a really clean distribution channel that compounds over time. The "make calls with users" part is universal though, that's the one I keep avoiding and probably shouldn't.
How long before the SEO started moving for you?
I guess the question is who is your customer or more specifically who's your buyer, who's your user and where do they hang out ? Also how do people find out about you product ? Distribution takes time, so I think its important to gauge interest upfront rather than commit to building first.
In general, the answer usually is to find people in your own network. If you go by that funnel the first thing you need is a network. LI is great at this. The next thing is to see who in your network is worth talking to. Find out whether the pain-point that you recognized resonates with them. A LI blast to your network might work as well to give you a bit of credibility. One thing that is cited often that does NOT work is spamming people asking for their time to learn about a problem. Nobody ever got back to me wit this method. But asking people in your own network for warm intros almost always works.
“The business enterprise has two—and only two—basic functions: marketing and innovation.” - Peter Drucker
I'm pretty sure my primary job is marketing the work that I do.
Message me I'll do 2h of being your marketing cofounder for free.
Source: CS grad turned revenue person
How about this counter offer? I give you 50% of the revenue for any sale you make for https://seaquel.app. If you tell me we need a lifetime offer, consider it done.
This product looks fantastic!
I got one question that I can't find the answer to on the website.
What sql variants does it support? Postgres? MariaDB?
Oh wait... haha your source doesn't match your professional experience :). My offer still stands though.
Not sure what you mean, I am definitely a CS grad and I run a Sales/Marketing org I built at a company I used to be CTO of :)
I'd love to take you up on that. Sending you a message, do you have an email/linkedin or preferred way to connect?
I've always relied on Google Ads and eventually SEO for my SaaS products. For SEO, I've had good success with having the landing page be an unauthenticated version of the app itself (modified to include SEO friendly text), allowing the users to immediately start using a limited version of the app which eventually prompts for signup. After signup, any data from the landing page shell gets pushed into their account.
This significantly reduces bounce rate compared to a traditional landing page and I've had good success getting to the top of popular search terms after a few months/years.
Jobs and Wozniak proved (at least in the 70s) that a great technical founder could team up with a brilliant marketer and build a huge company from next to nothing.
I seriously wonder if that can happen today. As a technical founder, I have tried to find a marketing partner for years. Every time it has failed miserably as each one proved unable to move the needle.
In my case, it could be the product, but I wonder who has seen success in this day and age.
This is exactly the problem I've been sitting with for some time now. Every platform I tried to find a marketing partner on was either dead, full of bots, or just a generic co-founder matching app with no real skin in the game.
I'm actually building something about this, would love to stay in touch and share it with you when it's live. Might be exactly what you've been looking for.
In case you are interested to stay in touch, shoot me a message. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/lazarbogosavljevic/)
Jobs was a marketer, a product visionary and a ruthless businessman. You need more than just marketing.
Asshole. The word you're looking for is asshole.
I once knew a guy who was disabled and walked on crutches. Jobs got mad at him for being late to a meeting, and the guy replied "well someone parked in the handicapped parking spot, and it took me awhile to walk from a normal parking spot.
No joke, Jobs looks him (a disabled person) directly in the eye, and says "oh, that was me; I think the country built an excess of disabled parking spaces after WW2." To the disabled guy!!!
Wow, that's the rare kind of thing where I might consider quitting on the spot.
Also considered to be one of the best ever at these
I don't really know the answer you are looking for. I think it's different from one product to the next. I haven't managed to gain massive traction from the things I've built so far, but one thing I'm doing differently this time is treating marketing like the gym. I mean, don't expect overnight results, but make a consistent plan and continue to implement it over months and years not weeks and days.
ETA: based on your profile you started March 20 but in 2025 and your domain name expired. Did you build a product that has a fixed cost to remain live? I found your video, your YT seems popular. You can make a free website with GitHub pages and point your URL at that at least. Keep persisting, you can do it.
No, that was one of the products I slowly did let die, and kinda modified the product to be open-sourced, cli first tool.
Thanks for the words of support. I will definitely try to be more active on youtube and leverage that.
Think of marketing as "letting people who might use/buy your product that it exists."
You can't buy it if you have no idea it exists, right?
So how do you get the word out to the potential duatomers? You can read traction (the book), or just ask gemini/perplexity where you should advertise to find them.
depending on product, I've been using Claude code to do market analysis. I'm quite surprised at how good it has been. I'm not sure how well it works in general, but for Agriculture (which we target) there is a LOT of information out there so analyzing market segments is pretty good.
what about generate the social media posts first. like 30 between text, media pictures videos even more first.
later automate the daily upload? but human in the loop doing egamement is a must.
> Every single one followed the same pattern: build, post, get 12 likes from friends, a bit of organic traction, then nothing.
> I know I need marketing help but giving equity to someone I met online feels like a huge risk.
No offense, but your equity, from your own admission, is literally worthless. If someone decides to help you out for your equity, you should be jumping for joy. Most likely you need to pay out of your pocket, but if you're not willing to risk your own capital, then how can you expect others to risk theirs?
None taken, I agree with you, and it is a fair point. I need to rethink my approach.
On one particular project I started by "spamming" relevant interest based forums. Luckily I was a member of said forums for quite a while before I have released my first version. It was about 13 years ago. Strategy had worked and then I got CEO as a partner along with some investment so I no longer had to do it
It’s easy to learn it’s just boring. Spend half your time marketing from day one. Be strict about it
You take off your solo technical founder pants and put on your solo marketing founder hat.
In business, selling is much much much more important than making because if you have money you can hire technical workers. But nobody will care nearly as much about survival as you.
And if you have a technical background you are much more likely to have technical people in your network. Good luck.
Pants are for closers.
>I know I need marketing help but giving equity to someone I met online feels like a huge risk.
doesn't seem like you're risking much if your products are not getting any traction in the first place
Fair point.
It's not impossible to be a one-man army. carry on
Recently:
Marketing for Founders
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47380295
Very useful advice on this post.
Every change you do to make the product better 10x the effectiveness of your mkt
I am curious what products you shipped? Could you share link of 1 or 2 here?
Most of them are down honestly, which kind of proves the point of my post.
Ourbit (ourbitapp.com) is still a work in progress (wrapping up the demo/assetes/characters).
BuzzBench is down but the repo is open and there's a demo video if you want to see what it did: github.com/LazarKap/buzzbench / https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yAnbZMoQvmQ.
Building something new right now that's directly about this problem, will share when it's live.
Next to this, I have like 3 more failed projects.
I must say you have very strong skills. I also build something but planning to kill it. Now not planning to build anything as almost all the spaces are saturated. Do not stop, good luck
Thanks for the words of encouragement, as you said to me, DON'T stop, and good luck.
If I can help somehow, hit me up on linkedin, Il be glad. https://www.linkedin.com/in/lazarbogosavljevic/
honestly the thing that worked best for me was just writing about the problem i was solving, not the product. like a dev.to post about why server side processing is unnecessary for most dev utility tools got way more traction than any "hey check out my thing" post ever did. people engage with the take, then they find the tool naturally. also reddit > twitter for early stage imo, the subreddits are way more targeted
I am using channels like indiehackers, reddit, x.These can be helpful for you.But i need to say that its hard bro, not easy.
There's been a course for that since before 2015: https://30x500.com/academy/
I am currently taking it.
From the landing page:
> Most of us, when we want to ship a product, we start at the beginning and with the most obvious ingredient: the product. Because when you can create, the act of creating feels most natural and straightforward. But it makes it so easy to end up with a product that nobody wants to buy. And isn't that every new entrepreneur's worst nightmare? All that work, and nobody cares.
Let us know how it went. Good Luck
Yes