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by justiceforsaas 2046 days ago
I think you've gone from one extreme to the other. Yes, building a product with no distribution sucks. So does doing distribution without having anything to show for it.

Take this from a guy who spent 2 years studying distribution channels [1]. There's nothing wrong about spending a week or two developing a MVP before focusing on distribution.

I think the key is to start with 1) The minimum thing you can do and call a 'product' 2) Try to promote/distribute it to see the response. So far you've done:

a) A web page explaining what your product is about

Some steps to (progressively) get to a "better" MVP may be:

b) Make a video showcasing your product (which can be a simple Figma design with static screens that show once you click on them)

c) Build a feature that's high on the ICE Scoring model [2], and distribute that

d) Build a meaningfully different feature than c) and promote it as a SEPARATE product. Let your features be like split tests you promote on the same/different distribution channels and see how they perform.

[1] https://firstpayingusers.com

[2] https://university.hygger.io/en/articles/2288376-ice-scoring

2 comments

You've posted your link 23 times in the last month—that's well over the line into spamming.

Even apart from that, your account is using HN primarily for promotion, which is against the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

We ban accounts that do these things, so if you wouldn't mind reviewing the guidelines and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful. The intended spirit is intellectual curiosity, which is not at all the same thing as having something to promote, though it's fine to bring up one's own work as part of good conversation.

I agree that there's nothing wrong with spending a week or two developing an MVP first.

I don't plan on spending more than 3-4 weeks building an MVP, which I'll start within 2 weeks.

An advantage that my current approach gives me is a few dozen low-commitment (but qualified) waitlist users that have shown some initial interest.

I obviously have some close friends that will try it out with their teams. But going distribution-first allows me to easily expand beyond that close circle to a more unbiased group of people.