This is such a great topic and one that everyone seems to have differing opinions/strategies on! It's also a reason that I think many people suggest that you build something you yourself would use (and pay for -- big distinction). My guess is that if you build a product you'd use, then chances are you'd know where to find people that would use it as well. This can be anything from forums, meetups or even local events like Chambers of Commerce (if you're in the US).
One of the best pieces of advice that I remember hearing is that you need to be at the right place and time when someone is looking to buy. It's a lot to unpack, and I'm going to try and avoid the jargon. Say you're building a developer tool that "grades" your front-end build. Things like code-complexity, size, and maybe performance. If you're someone that built this, but never has done any front-end development, you'll likely blog about it on your site or create some content someplace. However, if you are a front-end developer you'll likely know a Slack channel or group/meetup already where folks are tackling this problem right now. That's exactly where you want to be -- next to the people that are looking for solutions to the issue!
browserless.io was the first time this clicked for me. I tried many many attempts in ecommerce and affiliate sites, but couldn't ever gain traction. That was because I didn't know other folks in similar positions, so I couldn't get it in front of them in a way that they'd trust it.
Obviously bigger companies that receive funding or have a lot of "runway" can just spend money or hire out to do this work. If it's just you, or you're bootstrapped, then you'll need to be much more strategic in what the product is knowing that you'll have an uphill battle getting users.
You definitely got a point. Hopefully w/ a few more tries I'll get one of them right! I definitely need to do a bit more research on my target audience.
With Browserless.io, when would you say was the "wow this will work" point? Did you have doubt up to a certain event?
Fun story, actually! I was actually building a wish-list aggregator of sorts. It was pretty simple -- you pasted a link to a product you wanted to share with others so that they can buy stuff for you and mark it as bought without having to confer with other purchasers. I was literally scraping the links sent in for pricing and pictures to make the site more usable, and then I stumbled on Target's website which was a single-page app. This meant they had no usable HTML in their initial response, which meant I had to run a browser to parse/execute the JavaScript on the page and give me the results.
After going down the steps to do this I learned it was quite painful. I did a lot of research to see if there was a product that just did this already, and there wasn't! That's when I threw the whole "wishlist" app out the door and started working on browserless.
The TL;DR here really is that this was:
Something I would pay for.
Something I needed to ship a product.
Didn't already exist (not necessarily a requirement, but I really liked it!).
Glad to hear it -- don't ever stop trying! I'm still failing, which I don't think gets talked about enough. Failures really are the pressure-cookers for success and we should talk about them more.
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This is such a great topic and one that everyone seems to have differing opinions/strategies on! It's also a reason that I think many people suggest that you build something you yourself would use (and pay for -- big distinction). My guess is that if you build a product you'd use, then chances are you'd know where to find people that would use it as well. This can be anything from forums, meetups or even local events like Chambers of Commerce (if you're in the US).
One of the best pieces of advice that I remember hearing is that you need to be at the right place and time when someone is looking to buy. It's a lot to unpack, and I'm going to try and avoid the jargon. Say you're building a developer tool that "grades" your front-end build. Things like code-complexity, size, and maybe performance. If you're someone that built this, but never has done any front-end development, you'll likely blog about it on your site or create some content someplace. However, if you are a front-end developer you'll likely know a Slack channel or group/meetup already where folks are tackling this problem right now. That's exactly where you want to be -- next to the people that are looking for solutions to the issue!
browserless.io was the first time this clicked for me. I tried many many attempts in ecommerce and affiliate sites, but couldn't ever gain traction. That was because I didn't know other folks in similar positions, so I couldn't get it in front of them in a way that they'd trust it.
Obviously bigger companies that receive funding or have a lot of "runway" can just spend money or hire out to do this work. If it's just you, or you're bootstrapped, then you'll need to be much more strategic in what the product is knowing that you'll have an uphill battle getting users.
Whew! That was a lot -- hope it helps!
Thank you for taking the time to answer!
You definitely got a point. Hopefully w/ a few more tries I'll get one of them right! I definitely need to do a bit more research on my target audience.
With Browserless.io, when would you say was the "wow this will work" point? Did you have doubt up to a certain event?
(hope you don't mind the follow-up question 😅)
Hey no worries!
Fun story, actually! I was actually building a wish-list aggregator of sorts. It was pretty simple -- you pasted a link to a product you wanted to share with others so that they can buy stuff for you and mark it as bought without having to confer with other purchasers. I was literally scraping the links sent in for pricing and pictures to make the site more usable, and then I stumbled on Target's website which was a single-page app. This meant they had no usable HTML in their initial response, which meant I had to run a browser to parse/execute the JavaScript on the page and give me the results.
After going down the steps to do this I learned it was quite painful. I did a lot of research to see if there was a product that just did this already, and there wasn't! That's when I threw the whole "wishlist" app out the door and started working on browserless.
The TL;DR here really is that this was:
That was the "aha" moment!
Seeing how things unraveled from your point of view is really inspiring!
Thank you for sharing this! Looking forward to my "Aha" moment! 😛
Glad to hear it -- don't ever stop trying! I'm still failing, which I don't think gets talked about enough. Failures really are the pressure-cookers for success and we should talk about them more.