Disclosure: I do growth work for 01MVP, which is mentioned below.
A friend of mine spent three months building a meal-planning app. Auth, offline sync, a settings screen with 14 options. He launched it in a Sunday-night Reddit post, got 9 upvotes and zero signups, and quietly archived the repo two weeks later.
The code was fine. Honestly, the code was good. What killed the project was that the first time a stranger saw the product was after it was finished.
I've watched this exact pattern repeat across side projects I've helped with growth. It's rarely a technical failure. It's almost always skipped validation — and the fix is embarrassingly unsexy: find your first 10 users before you write code, not after.
Why 10, and why before?
Ten is small enough that you can find them by hand, and large enough that patterns show up. One enthusiastic friend tells you nothing. Ten strangers who share the same complaint tell you a lot.
"Before" matters because of what those conversations do to your build plan. Every hour you spend talking to potential users before coding deletes entire weeks from your roadmap. My friend's meal-planning app had offline sync because he thought it was table stakes. None of the people he later talked to had ever planned a meal without an internet connection.
What "finding users before code" actually looks like
None of this requires a landing page, a waitlist tool, or a logo. It requires being mildly uncomfortable:
1. Write the complaint, not the pitch. Go to the places your users already hang out (a subreddit, a Discord, a niche forum) and search for people describing the problem in their own words. Screenshot the exact phrasing. If you can't find 10 people complaining about the problem, that's not a distribution issue — the pain might not be real.
2. DM with a question, not a link. "How do you currently handle X?" out-converts "Check out my app" by a mile, mostly because there's no app to check out yet. You're collecting verbs: what they do today, what they tried, what they gave up on.
3. Do the job manually for two of them. If your product idea is "automated changelog generator," write two changelogs by hand for two real projects. You'll learn more about edge cases in an afternoon than in a month of speculative coding. And the two maintainers you helped? Users one and two.
4. Ask the second-order question. "Would you use this?" is worthless — everyone says yes to hypothetical software. "What are you using today, and what did it cost you?" is where the truth lives. People who have already spent money or hours on a problem are your actual market.
5. Pre-commit them to something small. Not money, necessarily. A reply that says "ping me when the beta is up" is a weak signal. Someone who agrees to a 15-minute call next Tuesday is a strong one. The strength of your first 10 users is measured in how much friction they've already accepted.
The ordering problem
The reason most of us skip all this isn't laziness — it's that building feels like progress and talking to strangers feels like procrastination. The dopamine is exactly backwards.
That's the thing I appreciate about how 01MVP structures the 0→1 path: it forces the questions into the right order. Who is the user, what is the pain, which channel do the first ten come from — and only then, what's the smallest thing you can ship. It reads less like a growth hack and more like a checklist that keeps you from building auth for an app nobody asked for. I've sent it to two developer friends this year; one of them killed a half-built project after working through the first section. He considers that a win. So do I.
The part nobody tells you
Your first 10 users will mostly be found one at a time, through embarrassingly manual work: replying to forum threads, sending DMs that feel awkward, doing jobs by hand that your future product is supposed to automate.
That doesn't scale. It's not supposed to. Scaling is a problem you've earned the right to have after ten real people care.
Ship the conversation first. The code can wait three weeks — it's waited this long.
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