DEV Community: John

Finding Startup Ideas By Reading Negative Customer Reviews

John — Thu, 12 Sep 2024 03:35:08 +0000

As a founder, we commonly struggle in identifying a problem worth solving. And we often face challenges in validating whether there is a market of people who would actually pay for the solution.

A simple and effective way to find startup ideas that has a good probability of getting paying customers is to read negative customer reviews.

Places where you can read negative reviews are the following:

Apple App Store
Google Play
WordPress Plugins page
Shopify App Store
G2
ProductHunt

Read what customers are saying about the products. What’s missing? What’s driving them crazy? Those are your clues.

When you see a pattern of frustration, you’ve struck gold. Those are where the existing products are failing and that is your opportunity. You can develop a solution that addresses those pain points.

The benefit of this strategy is you are solving a real problem that customers are experiencing and there is a high probability that they will pay for your solution.

Struggling to get your first customers for your startup? Find your customers in seconds with social media AI — CustomerFinderBot

Subscribe here to get emails on the lessons I’m sharing on building startups.

The SaaS that I'm building in public made $534.76 in revenue in the first 2 weeks after launch 🎉

John — Wed, 11 Sep 2024 10:00:14 +0000

I will share what I did to get customers and the lessons I learned to help fellow startup founders.

The revenue is not life-changing, but I’m thrilled it’s gaining traction! 🙏

A little backstory:

After many failed startups, I realized the problem I needed to solve for myself: finding customers.

So, I built CustomerFinderBot to scratch my own itch, and it turns out others found it useful too.

The pitch:

Find Your Customers in Seconds with Social Media AI.

Until now, I still can't believe that people are using and paying for a tool that I built. I have very low expectations when I built and launched this because I'm already so used to building and launching projects and ending up with 0 or close to 0 users.

Or when my previous projects gained some users, none are willing to pay so they end up being added to my list of failures.

Launch Results:

1st day - Gained 2 paying customers
2nd day - 0
3rd day - Gained 1 paying customer
4th day - 0
5th day - Gained 7 paying customers

After that, sales started coming in almost daily!

Here is what I did so far to get paying customers:

Share the project on Reddit and Twitter/X.
Find people on Twitter and Reddit that are looking for alternatives to my competitors, complaining about my competitors or asking recommendations for a solution to their problem that my product directly solves.

I use CustomerFinderBot to save time and effort since it automates these things.

Then I reach out to them to help them by answering their questions and suggesting the tool that I built.

It's a win-win for both parties.

This strategy is effective because they already want my product so they have a high probability to end up buying.

My next steps:

Keep on iterating by improving the tool based on customer feedback.
List on directory websites.
Launch on Product Hunt.
Invest time and effort in SEO. This takes a lot of effort and patience because it takes a while to see results but based on what I learned from others and from my own personal experience it's one of the most sustainable customer acquisition channel.
Build and ship free tools for marketing purposes and it will also help with SEO.

Lessons I learned? 👇

Building and growing a SaaS is hard as hell. It's not a quick and easy way to make money and it has a very high failure rate considering around 90% of startups fail.
Gathering feedback from customers really provides you with a lot of valuable information. You will discover a lot use-cases that you haven't think of which will give you a better idea on what features you should build. By doing this, you'll end up building features that your target customers really needs and wants instead of building features that you think will be useful but ends up no one uses.
Burn out is real so do everything you can to prevent it. It's really very tiring especially if you're a solo founder which does all the work.
Solve real problems (e.g, save them time and effort, make them more money). Focus on the pain points of your target customers. Solve 1 problem and do it really well.
Prefer to use the tools that you already know. Don’t spend too much time thinking about what are the best tool to use. The best tool for you is the one you already know. Your customers won't care about the tools you used, what they care about is you're solving their problem.
Don't add every feature you can think of. Start with a MVP that solves the core problem, then iterate based on user feedback.
Validate immediately to see if people will pay for it then move on if not. Don't over-engineer. It doesn't need to be scalable initially.
Do lots of marketing, this is a must because build it and they will come rarely succeeds.
Keep on shipping 🚀 Many small bets instead of 1 big bet to manage risk and increase your odds of launching a product that customers will pay for.

I hope this post helps others to get their first customers for their startups.

Any questions? I'll be happy to answer them!

Let's follow each other on Twitter - https://x.com/FI_investor

Check out my other projects:

Calm-Jobs.com - Find Jobs With Better Work-Life Balance.

JobHunterBot.com - Automatically Find Jobs from LinkedIn, Indeed, Glassdoor, Monster, ZipRecruiter, and hundreds of other job boards.

I scraped thousands of jobs from the internet and used AI (GPT4) to score them based on work-life balance

John — Fri, 19 Jul 2024 17:00:57 +0000

AI really makes extracting and analyzing data very simple today compared to pre-AI times.

It made it really easy for me to get and analyze infos that are difficult to manually do via code. It allowed me to build Calm Jobs in just a few hours.

The process was very simple:

Scrape job post pages.
Send the text content of the whole page to AI and ask it to extract salary information and analyze the post to calculate a work-life balance score.

The work-life balance score calculation uses these data points:

• Flexible Working Hours
• Remote Work Options
• Vacation Policy
• Company Culture
• Workload Expectations

I'm planning to add more data points to analyze for calculating the score. Got any suggestions?

Also, ask me anything! :)

I launched 4 Projects in Just 2 Weeks! Thanks to the incredible tools we have today

John — Fri, 12 Jul 2024 12:21:32 +0000

Incredibly, it took less than 24 hours of work! 🤯

The tools available today for building startups are phenomenal, enabling us to create MVPs at lightning speed compared to a decade ago.

Check out the projects below 👇

Calm Jobs - An 🤖 AI powered aggregator of jobs from companies that value work-life balance. I used AI for extracting job information and for calculating a "calm score" for the job posts.
MakerList - A directory of tools for building, shipping & marketing startup ideas.
EzNotes - Speak ideas, get perfect notes, instantly. It basically transforms your audio recording into a polished note.
Grumpy AI "Roast Your Startup Idea" - It's a witty app for quickly getting feedback on your startup ideas.

Here are the tools I used to build them 👇

• Ruby on Rails
• Postgresql
• Tailwind CSS
• Github Copilot
• ChatGPT
• OpenAI
• Docker
• Kamal
• Digital Ocean
• Trello
• Gitlab