Build it and they will come

On May 27 I’ll launch my Solopreneur Masterclass, focused on creating a successful internet business as solopreneurs. This post is a little preview, if you enjoy reading this, then the masterclass is for you.

The problem with programmers is that they find building software fun.

Before going on, note: I am a programmer as well, so when you read this piece, keep in mind I wrote it to help you.

I couldn’t sleep this morning and so rolling in the bed I started scrolling Hacker News, as you do.

I found a post wrote by some person who worked on a product for 1 year, then launched the product into the void, and got zero users.

Now they’re trying to figure out how to get customers, with no clear way on how to get them, no social media presence, no network, no email list, nothing.

They think now it’s the time to “do marketing”, and drive people to their product – and quick, as funding is running out.

That’s some sad situation for anyone to end up into.

The question I ask is, does anyone even need your product?

Some people will bore you with advice on how to do market research, interview customers, bla bla bla. If that sounds interesting to you, just buy The Mom Test and go from there. I find all of that really tedious and really something I don’t want to do. That sounds like work to me and I don’t want to do work. Work is boring.

What I’ll do instead is, I’ll suggest you to not go in a cave and work on a product for too long, and then show up with something no one was expecting.

If you ask me, I’d suggest you throw away everything you did, and start from scratch.

Start observing. What do people already need? How can you enter the conversation? What’s an advantage you have, something that comes easy to you and hard to other people?

To me that was teaching. I started writing, people started telling me they liked the way I wrote, they found my writing clearer than other people’s writing, and I went on from there, creating a little “empire” of educational material spanning from tutorials to books and to courses.

I didn’t spend 1 year to create a coding bootcamp and show up “who wants to learn programming?” - no, I first wrote for multiple years, wrote guest blog posts, showed up with many small mini-products before deciding to work on a bigger product.

This applies to products, too. Before going all-in on education I worked on products. I built a ton of software products and sold them. Including iPhone apps, macOS apps, CMS plugins.

Some of them had a small success, some failed, but they were one month of work from zero to release.

The biggest failure came from a project I worked for a contractor earlier in my career who decided to create a product in a space they had no business in, it took way too long due to various factors, and when released, it failed to get paying users, so it got shut down as funding depleted.

That was something the person writing on Hacker News reminded me of.

Don’t just build something and expect people to show up.

Iterate. Talk to people first. Find someone to use a super minimal MVP of your idea on week 1. Get feedback. Get more people in.

If you can’t find anyone early stage to talk about your idea, imagine how you’re going to find customers later on.

Let me get more hands-on here.

Writing about his made me remember something I was working on, around 2008 if I recall correctly. It was a tool built around Git and the GitHub API. Thinking back I think it was a really neat tool, and had potential for enterprise usage. I had the perfect domain name, a good intuition, but – and it’s a big “but” – I couldn’t get anyone to use it.

Back then I had no email list, no big Twitter presence, no network at all.

The plan was trying to contact people 1 on 1. I tried emailing or DMing people, I think about 20 people, maybe 3 responded, 1 tried the tool for 30 seconds and never heard again.

That was quite demoralizing and eventually I moved on to another project and forgot about it.

I think today, if only I wanted, I could turn this into a better outcome because now I’d have a better chance at distributing it, as I have an “audience” of developers through various channels, including my email list and social media presence. And I know a lot of people privately that work at different companies, I have some sort of “track record” and probably they’d be interested in using my thing.

So here’s what I’d do in my case.

First, I’d just start writing about what I’m doing. Some sort of “document the journey” kind of writing. I’d write blog posts, I’d write on Twitter now X, I’d make videos on YouTube, I’d email my list twice a week and talk about it, extracting lessons from what I’m doing, things that could be interesting to anyone, and along the way I’d raise awareness on the project.

This thing alone would make the project successful, I don’t have a way to prove it (except actually doing it, which I have no interest in, at the moment) but I feel it.

And since all the mentioned activities are 2-way channels, perhaps talking about it would trigger a reply from someone that has some insight on how to tackle a different aspect, maybe adding some specific feature that would totally change the product for the better.

That’s early feedback.

I could “enroll” people to use the thing for free as alpha users, and this would get the ball rolling.

That’s an idea. Still an idea, but in my mind this plan is better than working on something for months and months, and having no other “marketing strategy” other than hopelessly trying to get upvotes on Product Hunt on “launch day”.

On launch day you should already have tons of paying users, and it should just be a way to accelerate your growth.

“But, Flavio, why don’t you do all you said above??” - while extremely common among developers, for good reasons, I do not want a product business because I very much prefer the education business I already have, which grants me a lot of advantages I discuss in the Solopreneur Masterclass.