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by mparr4 2655 days ago
> Started a business by making a website instead of finding a customer?

How do you go about finding a customer without at least a prototype? You need to do market research, sure, but how do you get a customer without a product?
1 comments
Milank 2655 days ago
Read this for example: https://lifehacker.com/im-joel-gascoigne-and-this-is-the-sto...
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mparr4 2655 days ago
Wow. Great post. Thanks for sharing.

The heavy personal touch at first reminds me of PG’s quote: “Do things that don’t scale”

I’ve recently launched a product, https://bugbucket.io that solves a problem I have but I’m struggling to find that first customer.

The whole lightweight approach makes sense but now the problem is identifying whether the experiment is a failure or just needs to get in front of more folks...

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Milank 2652 days ago
You're welcome.

It takes some time to get used to lean principles, especially if you have a dev background (as you do it seams). It's the opposite of "build it and they will come" mantra, and dev people are always like "how do you mean sell it before it's built?!" But it works. And it's a way better approach.

As for your tool, if you built it because you had the same problem, you are in the perfect position. You should understand very well the pain points, who has them, how it affects their everyday work and from there it should be easy to make tactics on how to approach potential users, what are the best selling points.

They say (and I completely agree) that the best sales person in a startup are founders, because they know everything about the idea, they are passionate about it and they don't give up easily.

Good luck!

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HeyLaughingBoy 2655 days ago
Ideas:

Sell it to github or gitlab.

Troll through github looking for repositories that are actually commercial products and contact the owners to use bugBucket?

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