We are all building some kind of product or business and gaining the first 10 users can be a difficult task. You not only need them as users they play a very big role as they believed in your product, but they will also provide the non-biased review about your product and that will define how you'll shape your product. So, I would be grateful to ask about the process of getting the first 10 customers. We'll learn from each other's experience and we'll appreciate other's effort and help out them who need their initial users. If you want to discuss with me personally then you can connect with me through Twitter and LinkedIn
I've spent a lot of time thinking about the difference between testing a product and validating it.
When you're building software, there are so many things you can measure. Does the functionality work? Are the calculations correct? Can users complete the workflow? Are the security controls working as intended?
Those are important questions, and you can spend months getting them right.
But there's another question that technical testing can't fully answer:
I'm planning out my year for serving people with community building things. I'd love to know... Where do you get stuck building community? And what would you like to learn about how to build one?
A particular guy was complaining about too generous employee care system in Netherlands. (I am not Dutch, so I do not know the exact rules, but as for me, no system is completely fair to anybody.) I know that without written rules, either employees or employers can exploit it.
Not a pity post I've recovered and I'm launching again in six weeks. But I want to write down the post-mortem while it's still fresh, because I made three mistakes that I now see everywhere in other people's launches.
Mistake one: I treated the launch as the marketing, not a moment in an existing marketing motion. I had no list, no audience, no warm network on PH. 63 upvotes was basically my friends plus luck.
Mistake two: my tagline described the category ("AI-powered project management") instead of a result. Nobody clicks a category.
Mistake three: I launched on a Tuesday because "Tuesday sounds good." I had no idea what else was launching that day. Two well-known companies launched the same day and I was invisible.
This week in the Product Hunt blog, we have a banger from Julia Yu. She's the co-founder of 2024 Golden Kitty winner Unicorns Club, which matches VCs with early-stage startups. She's also founded three VC-backed companies herself.
According to Julia, early-stage founders need to change their mental model about pre-seed funding ASAP. As she puts it:
Once upon a time (in fact, as recently as two years ago), early-stage startups needed three things to get into investor conversations: a strong narrative, a solid team, and a prototype. Now, in most software categories, that s no longer enough.
The advent of AI has shifted investors attention to actual metrics. Yes, even at the pre-seed level, investors don t care so much about promise as they do about realized potential. They want monthly recurring revenue (MRR) and growth rate.
