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This is going to sound overly reductive, but I promise it's not: 1) What existing solution do you believe your product (or prospective product) is better than?

This is going to sound overly reductive, but I promise it's not: 1) What existing solution do you believe your product (or prospective product) is better than? 2) Where can you find a critical mass of people who use the existing solution? 3) Go there. Talk to them. Show them your product. Now, none of this is trivial. First, because assuming you're operating lean, you start with no real clue if you're "better" than anyone or anything else, or on what dimensions that actually matter. You start with a hypothesis, and you have to seek out opinions (customer development). Second, because the existing solution might not be what you think it is. Or it might not be a product at all. It might be a behavior people are doing, or an "off-label" use of another product. But by and large, this method works. It might not get you scale. But it'll get you in front of potential users, and those users will be primed to try out your product. The trick is in identifying the existing solution, finding people who use it, and getting some of their time. I'd definitely advocate doing this before doing any "Show HN" posts. Show HN is a (potential) way to get a lot of traffic and attention in one blast. You don't want to play that card until you know you can benefit from it: either in terms of feedback (you'll want to have vetted out basic users and assumptions first), or in terms of users (aim for some indications of fit before firing the shotgun). The other problem with relying on Show HN, or Reddit, is that there's luck of the draw involved. Sometimes your post gets buried or washed out by the noise. Being good is no firm guarantee of charting to page one.

logicallee 13y ago
I'm going to go ahead and disagree with you completely. Apple didn't find a critical mass of blackberry users (the leading smart phone at time of iPhone introduction) and market something better to them. It just made a smart phone and marketed it to everyone. When it made the iPod back in the day, it didn't find a critical mass of people using hard drive based players already. It created one for everyone. In more formal terms, if you are trying to steal someone else's customer you have to do something on day 1 (first sale) that is more than 100% as good. But if you are marketing to different customers, you are acting like a reseller of your competition, with the difference that you don't actually have to buy it from them, but can make it at cost. It's far better to be in the second situation. I don't think the right strategy is to take on entrenched competition head-on. It's better to create a new market.
- lee 13y ago
  I think what he's getting at is that a fairly large problem with starting a start-up is that you don't know if your product or service has a market in the first place. If you start with a fresh idea, then you have to test and discover if what you are offering is viable. By taking an existing product or service, and improving upon it, that entire first phase of discovery is done for you. That's why most new businesses aren't building something novel (ie: opening up a restaurant, retail store, software consulting, etc...). That discovery phase is expensive. So if you're boot-strapping or limited on capital and time, then you're in a situation where creating something new is extremely risky. Even large companies with lots of resources often fail when launching a novel product. Not every company is like Apple. And conversely, many successful companies built on existing solutions. Google wasn't the first search engine. Facebook wasn't the first social network. Microsoft Word wasn't the first word processor. I'll agree that "It's better to create a new market." But only IF you have the resources to take on that kind of risk.
  - logicallee 13y ago
    sure - the resources, or the vision.
    - dhoulb 13y ago
      One of the biggest advantages some companies have, is having one or more people who can, kinda, SEE the future, without needing to focus group everything. An ability to intuit what's right - what'll work - without needing to test and prove every hypothesis (expensive), or worse: launch a product that falls flat (crazy expensive). It's definitely something some people are better at than others. Jobs was obviously a total pro. Gates was alright. Ballmer sucks at it. A lot of that is taste. Taste mixed with direction.
- jonnathanson 13y ago
  I think you're slightly misunderstanding me. I'll chalk that up to my not being as clear as I could have been. I'm not talking about stealing from competition. What I'm saying is that every startup is solving a pain point or a need-state of some sort. That's the reason for the existence of the startup in the first place. You might have competitors attempting to solve the same pain point in the same way, and you might not. Either way, you're trying to solve a pain point. How do you gauge the validity of your product and find your first 100 users? You do this by gauging the validity of the pain point you've identified. You do this because, in a sense, the value of your product is the delta between Your Solution and User Pain. Nine times out of ten, users have an existing solution (or behavior) they're doing to try to solve the pain -- but your product is going to be better, or at least you hope. Let's look at your iPod example. There were some MP3 players in the market before the iPod launched, but for the sake of argument, we'll say that these players were insignificant at the time. So what was the pain point, and what was the existing solution, when Apple launched the iPod? The pain point was not being able to take your music library on the go -- most people had to make do with a single CD at a time. Their existing solutions? Walkmen, portable radios, MP3 collections on their computers, and so forth. What was Apple's solution? "1,000 songs in your pocket." It's a common misconception that Apple "creates new markets" by bringing entirely-new-to-the-world products to everybody at once. Yes, they can do that now. They've got billions of dollars, a well-oiled marketing and distribution machine, their own highly successful sales channel, and distribution at every major retailer in the country. But that wasn't the case back in 2001. When Apple launched the iPod, it didn't launch to "everybody." It had to start with a segment of the market, which in 2001, was a relatively small set of Mac users and early tech adopters with big MP3 collections. It addressed and added more segments over the next few years, slowly building a snowball into critical mass, which it wouldn't achieve until roughly 2004-2006. Most startups are like Apple in 2001, not Apple in 2014. They don't have a megaphone they can shout from. Their customer set isn't the set of basically all consumers. In the long run, sure, that's a fantastic place to be. But you have to start somewhere a lot more specific. Which brings me back to the original topic: how do you get your first 100 users? The best way to get them is to assess which subset of users you believe will have the biggest delta between your value proposition and an existing need or pain. That's all I was trying to say. It's not about "stealing someone else's customers," per se. It's about solving needs. In the long run, maybe a billion people have this need, and you're indeed opening up a new market. Awesome. But you can't start there. You don't start with the set of all addressable users; you start with a subset of extremely addressable users.
phoenix1887 13y ago
good advice. Thanks!

logicallee 13y ago

I'm going to go ahead and disagree with you completely. Apple didn't find a critical mass of blackberry users (the leading smart phone at time of iPhone introduction) and market something better to them. It just made a smart phone and marketed it to everyone. When it made the iPod back in the day, it didn't find a critical mass of people using hard drive based players already. It created one for everyone. In more formal terms, if you are trying to steal someone else's customer you have to do something on day 1 (first sale) that is more than 100% as good. But if you are marketing to different customers, you are acting like a reseller of your competition, with the difference that you don't actually have to buy it from them, but can make it at cost. It's far better to be in the second situation. I don't think the right strategy is to take on entrenched competition head-on. It's better to create a new market.

lee 13y ago
I think what he's getting at is that a fairly large problem with starting a start-up is that you don't know if your product or service has a market in the first place. If you start with a fresh idea, then you have to test and discover if what you are offering is viable. By taking an existing product or service, and improving upon it, that entire first phase of discovery is done for you. That's why most new businesses aren't building something novel (ie: opening up a restaurant, retail store, software consulting, etc...). That discovery phase is expensive. So if you're boot-strapping or limited on capital and time, then you're in a situation where creating something new is extremely risky. Even large companies with lots of resources often fail when launching a novel product. Not every company is like Apple. And conversely, many successful companies built on existing solutions. Google wasn't the first search engine. Facebook wasn't the first social network. Microsoft Word wasn't the first word processor. I'll agree that "It's better to create a new market." But only IF you have the resources to take on that kind of risk.
- logicallee 13y ago
  sure - the resources, or the vision.
  - dhoulb 13y ago
    One of the biggest advantages some companies have, is having one or more people who can, kinda, SEE the future, without needing to focus group everything. An ability to intuit what's right - what'll work - without needing to test and prove every hypothesis (expensive), or worse: launch a product that falls flat (crazy expensive). It's definitely something some people are better at than others. Jobs was obviously a total pro. Gates was alright. Ballmer sucks at it. A lot of that is taste. Taste mixed with direction.
jonnathanson 13y ago
I think you're slightly misunderstanding me. I'll chalk that up to my not being as clear as I could have been. I'm not talking about stealing from competition. What I'm saying is that every startup is solving a pain point or a need-state of some sort. That's the reason for the existence of the startup in the first place. You might have competitors attempting to solve the same pain point in the same way, and you might not. Either way, you're trying to solve a pain point. How do you gauge the validity of your product and find your first 100 users? You do this by gauging the validity of the pain point you've identified. You do this because, in a sense, the value of your product is the delta between Your Solution and User Pain. Nine times out of ten, users have an existing solution (or behavior) they're doing to try to solve the pain -- but your product is going to be better, or at least you hope. Let's look at your iPod example. There were some MP3 players in the market before the iPod launched, but for the sake of argument, we'll say that these players were insignificant at the time. So what was the pain point, and what was the existing solution, when Apple launched the iPod? The pain point was not being able to take your music library on the go -- most people had to make do with a single CD at a time. Their existing solutions? Walkmen, portable radios, MP3 collections on their computers, and so forth. What was Apple's solution? "1,000 songs in your pocket." It's a common misconception that Apple "creates new markets" by bringing entirely-new-to-the-world products to everybody at once. Yes, they can do that now. They've got billions of dollars, a well-oiled marketing and distribution machine, their own highly successful sales channel, and distribution at every major retailer in the country. But that wasn't the case back in 2001. When Apple launched the iPod, it didn't launch to "everybody." It had to start with a segment of the market, which in 2001, was a relatively small set of Mac users and early tech adopters with big MP3 collections. It addressed and added more segments over the next few years, slowly building a snowball into critical mass, which it wouldn't achieve until roughly 2004-2006. Most startups are like Apple in 2001, not Apple in 2014. They don't have a megaphone they can shout from. Their customer set isn't the set of basically all consumers. In the long run, sure, that's a fantastic place to be. But you have to start somewhere a lot more specific. Which brings me back to the original topic: how do you get your first 100 users? The best way to get them is to assess which subset of users you believe will have the biggest delta between your value proposition and an existing need or pain. That's all I was trying to say. It's not about "stealing someone else's customers," per se. It's about solving needs. In the long run, maybe a billion people have this need, and you're indeed opening up a new market. Awesome. But you can't start there. You don't start with the set of all addressable users; you start with a subset of extremely addressable users.

phoenix1887 13y ago

good advice. Thanks!