Talking to people before building took me from failed projects to $9,000 in revenue

You’ve probably heard this before, but I think you need to hear it again.

I’ve spent the last year building projects, most of them failed.

But one recently hit 5,000+ users.

For the first 7 months of building, my projects wouldn’t get any interest no matter how hard I tried marketing them.

I tried following so many different marketing guides but nothing worked.

It made me realize I had to try something else because this was obviously not working.

So, I took the advice that everyone gives and decided to try talking to people before building.

Talking to what would be the target audience of my product more specifically.

I did it like this:

  • Created a Reddit post on my target audience’s subreddit
  • Asked them for feedback on my idea and tried to understand their process and pain points better (through a survey)
  • Offered to give them feedback in return for responding (to give an incentive to respond)

The response I got from my target audience was positive.

And this was nice since it made me feel more confident in moving forward with my project.. what I didn’t expect though, was the overwhelming response when launching.

2 weeks after launching my MVP it had raced up to 100 users.

That might not sound like much to everyone but coming from months of struggling to get users it was crazy to just blow up and get 100 in 2 weeks.

I wanted to keep building on this momentum so I quickly used all the feedback I got from the new users to improve the product, and then I launched on Product Hunt.

The Product Hunt launch was crazy as well.

I ranked #4 with 500+ upvotes and during the launch week I reached over 1,000 users.

Most exciting of all, I got my first paying customers after 7 months of building without making anything.

This was crazy to me.

Finally I had a product people were actually interested in.

AND they were paying for it.

I attribute so much of the success to actually talking to people this time before building.

It allowed me to:

  • Verify that the idea had potential
  • Shape the product according to what people wanted
  • Understand my target audience better
  • Not waste months building something no one wants again

So if there’s one thing to learn from my months of failures, it’s to talk to people before building your product.

I hope this can save someone from wasting months building a product that no one wants.

For the curious, my product is called Buildpad, and in short, I like to describe it as an AI co-founder.

Revenue proof since this is Reddit: https://imgur.com/a/qDLL8m4