Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by bruce511 647 days ago
It's a bit late here for my advice to be helpful to you but IMO these are questions to ask, and answer before you build the web app, not after.

The short answer to your question is "identify who your customer is, find out where they hang out (online or IRL), join that community, add value (not just your offering), demonstrate your usefulness and build credibility.

From that, you can sell product in a meaningful, sustained way, which reaches into the vote of their needs.

You've done it backwards, the easy bit first, and now the hard part will be harder. Instead of finding a niche, and filling it, you've filled a niche, and are now trying to find people in that niche.

Bur don't despair. You might yet pull it off. And if you don't consider it to be a really cheap part of your education. Making mistakes is how we gain experience and learn how the game is played.

1 comments

You're absolutely right. It's essential to identify the specific needs of your target audience first. My motivation for creating this product was to solve my own problem, and I believe there are others who might have similar needs. That's why I want to promote it.
You'd get a lot better responses if you explained to us what your product _is_ and also had a link to where it can be demoed or purchased.
Thank you for your reply. I'm currently working on two projects: AI image generation and an image splitter. I've just started independent development, and I'm still refining more features for the products.
Your targets are unclear so if this is a consumer product, I would suggest doing this as a free app with Google ads to help monetize - similar to ezgifmaker.com, et al. Capture the email, then gather feedback and promote your new updates directly from there. Repeat use cases are important - will someone use this once or consistently - this is a major factor in your marketing/sales direction.

If there’s an enterprise sales opportunity, you can create a premium account scheme.

I’d refrain from hiring a marketer (like me) as you really need to validate the product first. Users admitting to having your same pain point is still way premature to whether they’ll give you hard cash right now for the solution.

Good luck, I’m sure you’ll do great!

If you don't feel confident about sharing a link, your product isn't ready yet or you are lacking the confidence to let people see it while procrastinating with threads loke this one. You lost a great opportunity to "quickly launch your web product"