Journey to verify a dream, will it end up to be a nightmare?
Me and my partner have been dreaming to build a tech company for a long time. We wait for 30 years to have the courage because being a professional with a steady income was a high barrier to cross and more importantly, we have a family to feed. Then we invested patiently in tech companies and finally got FIRE. And here we are started our journey to verify our dreams. We have built our first app, which was an Instagram like photo app that verifies copyright with NFT. It is still sitting on the Apple app store with 56 users. It was a failure because users are not actively uploading pictures, and we have difficulties to reach out to photographers and artists, who are our target users. Then we started to build "Media-ana", a deepfake detection tool, which will be launched on Product Hunt on Friday. This is a beta version and we still need a lot of feedbacks to improve the product.
After diving right from a tech investor to a tech developer, I found developing is not the crucial part, distribution is. Finding the right users (persons/entities) are contacting them are the most difficult part. Let me know what you think.
Replies
Welcome to Product Hunt, @wendy_ng1
I found your post very honest and rooted in reality. Plus, you seem to have put out a bit of vulnerability there.
If you are open to feedback, I have some points for you worth considering...
Your launch is on Friday it seems, but you also admitted that it's a beta version with a lot of feedback yet to be gained.
But the validation won't really come from Product Hunt cuz your target users won't be here at all. That's how it is for most products listed on PH, don't worry.
I would suggest you to start with Reddit, and get at least some real anonymous feedback if not loyal users.
Maybe you can use the next 1 or 2 week to warm up your presence and product visibility here. But that would mean delaying your launch, and I am not sure how comfortable you would be hearing all this from a stranger like me.
I know these are lot of points to consider, so it's totally your call. But you can always ask questions, I will gladly answer.
Velocity: AI User testing
It's all relationships. Theres such a small sampling of users who are actually going to use your product daily but each one of those makes a huge difference. The forgotten early days of instagram were just a few influencers that people wanted to see their coffees and brunch. But it was everyone in the same workspace. Lean into the small, no one else on the web can see how physically close they are.
@kevin_mcdonagh1 Thank you for your comment. I actually did quite a lot of cold dm on artists and photographers. I thought I could pull some artists out of instagram, which their art could turn into training materials, but I underestimated the difficulty of leaving the platform.