[rgbrenner]

Who said anything about social media, and facebook likes, and advertising. Just stop. That isn't your product.

If your product is just a squarespace page... then that's the entire part of that step.

Do that, and then go talk to your customers. The rest of that is just procrastination, and frankly a waste of time and money at that stage... because there's no way you have product market fit that early, so why are you buying ads?

[thinbeige]

> Who said anything about social media

I don't care about Facebook and even if my product hasn't any relation to FB, Twitter, etc. At some point you probably need them anyway, eg for ads and then you must have a FB company page and thus a handle/account.

The best time to get those social media accounts is when you got the product domain name. The wise founder checked if the respective social media handles were free before he registered any domain name. You can also wait of course few months and register a cumbersome handle because somebody else took the the handle then.

My message was: Just setting up the foundation of a product and a company--and by foundation I don't mean the actual product--is already a lot of work.

[borplk]

"go talk to your customers" is much easier said than done.

[grey-area]

If you can’t identify and/or talk to customers, that is also a signal.

[marcus_holmes]

If you haven't talked to your customers before you started building anything, that is also a signal. A massive one.

[jerrre]

Nobody said it would be easy

[jakubp]

When we give advice that's too vague to be actionable, we aren't helping

[borplk]

It makes it sound like the customers are some clearly identifiable and reachable group of people all gathering outside just waiting for you to go talk to them.

For some businesses that may to some degree be the case. For many businesses that is not the case, although their customers can be defined they may not be easily or cheaply reachable. They may not all fall under the same category despite all sharing some fundamental problems for which the company is providing a solution.

So casually saying "just go talk to your customers" is about as helpful as saying "just go build your business".

[akelly]

The devils advocate position is that without a social media presence or ads, it can be difficult for some companies to find customers to talk to.

[jaggederest]

One of the things that I have learned the hard way is that if you don't have a channel to get at least initial customers by some means besides PPC advertising, you're unlikely to succeed.

One of the early competitive advantages you need to have is in "finding customers to talk to".

[hohenheim]

"finding customers to talk to": The so called seed.