Growing From Zero to Many Building Product and Talking to Customers Solo Developer

  • No need to keep your idea secret. Get feedback early and often by putting a minimum viable product in front of real users as soon as possible. Iterate based on their feedback.

  • Clearly identify the core problem you are trying to solve. State it in one sentence. Make sure it is a problem you are truly passionate about solving. Verify through customer research that others actually have this problem too.

  • Become an expert in the industry you are trying to disrupt. Spend time working in the industry to understand pain points. Do the service yourself to gain first-hand experience of customer needs. Obsessively research potential competitors.

  • Identify your target customer segment early on and optimize features specifically for them. Focus is critical when you have very few users. Avoid trying to be everything to everyone.

  • Before writing any code, storyboard the ideal user experience step-by-step. Map how a user becomes aware of you, learns about you, signs up, uses the product, provides feedback, etc.

  • Get your first users from people you know and local communities relevant to your product. Get creative about going where your target customers are to get feedback. Obsessively collect qualitative and quantitative customer feedback through surveys, in-person meetings, tracking retention cohorts, soliciting reviews, etc. Iterate rapidly based on insights.

  • At early stages, focus on building for your current user base, not future scale. Favor manual processes over automation. Avoid over-engineering.

  • Ship product iterations early and often. Get user feedback instead of trying to perfect the product in a vacuum. Assure quality but avoid paralysis.

  • Pick one growth channel and focus your efforts on really understanding it deeply before moving to the next thing. Always be iterating to optimize.

  • Analyze customer lifetime value versus customer acquisition costs, especially by cohort. Ensure paid channels have positive ROI.

If you hit walls on growth, retention, or economics despite concerted effort, consider pivoting. Tweak the model, not discard it entirely.

Here is a step-by-step guide of questions to answer before building a product:

  1. What problem are you trying to solve? State it in one clear sentence.
  2. Why are you passionate about solving this problem? How does it relate to you personally?
  3. Who has this problem? Verify through customer research that it’s not just you.
  4. What industry does this problem relate to? Become an expert in the industry.
  5. What is your target customer segment? Who will get the most value from your solution?
  6. How will your product solve the core problem for your customer segment? Storyboard the ideal user experience.
  7. What is the smallest feature set you can build to validate the solution? Scope the MVP.
  8. How will you get initial users to test the MVP? Identify communities, events, etc.
  9. How will you systematically collect user feedback on the product? Surveys, interviews, data, etc.
  10. How fast can you iterate to improve the product based on user insights? Prioritize speed.
  11. What metrics will determine if users find value in the product? Retention, NPS, etc.
  12. How will you spread word-of-mouth endorsement for the product? Referral program, viral factors, etc.
  13. What channels could you use to acquire customers profitably at scale? Paid marketing, SEO, etc.
  14. How long will you try different growth strategies before pivoting? Set timeline milestones.
  15. If needed, how can you tweak the model without starting completely over? Pivot risks and options.

Here is an example for a competitive intelligence startup:

  1. Problem: Businesses lack insights into competitors that impact strategy and growth.
  2. Passion: Our founders struggled to analyze the competition for their previous startup.
  3. Customers: Interviews with business owners revealed major pain points around competitor blindspots.
  4. Industry: Competitive intelligence pulls from data aggregation, analytics, business consulting.
  5. Segment: Mid-size B2B companies with limited resources to track competitors.
  6. Solution: A platform to generate competitor insights through data collection and analysis.
  7. MVP: Analytics for 2-3 core metrics on a handful of key competitors per customer.
  8. Users: Reach out to our target customer segment through LinkedIn outreach and events.
  9. Feedback: Send NPS surveys following platform use and interview power users on experience.
  10. Iterate: Prioritize additional data sources, analysis tools, and reports based on customer needs.
  11. Metrics: Customer retention rate, percentage of users actively accessing competitor insights.
  12. Referrals: Provide subscription discounts for referred leads that convert to customers.
  13. Channels: SEO, content marketing, sales outreach focused on our customer segment.
  14. Timeline: Evaluate progress quarterly and determine if pivot is needed within 1 year.
  15. Pivot: Expand to related use cases like market research or sales intelligence before changing models.