Why You Need Your First Customer Before Building a Product

I’ve spent a lot of time working on a wide spectrum of products. I’ve built over 30+ products (for other people), and i’ve run into a very common pattern of situations for the average product:

1- You spend a lot of time working on a product you believe will change the world.

2- You launch before you’ve done any product market-fit research and before you have any customers lined up.

3- You give it all you have on the launch. You email all your friends, family, acquaintances. You post on Twitter, Facebook, every social media outlet you can find. You try to get the press to cover your launch.

4- Nobody cares that you launched.

5- You start to loose momentum and confidence.

6- Your project/product becomes a hobby after about 3–6 months.

7- You either continue to cling onto some false hope that your product will magically go viral eventually, or you realize that you need to try something else.

Why does this happen? Why is this a pattern?

a) You didn’t do your homework. By homework, not only does that mean making sure you are solving a problem and that you are building something that people want, but by making sure you have people ready that are willing to actually pay to use your product from day one, or even before day one.

b) You lack persistence. Even if you have the most amazing product, the chances are high that no one will care when you launch. That’s ok, because there is no one grand launch. You have to be ready to launch again and again and again. Consider the story of Airbnb, they had to keep relaunching until anybody cared about them. If you are not ready for this level of persistence, perhaps you should not be building your product in the first place.

So, what’s the solution?

There is no exact solution for everyone on this. There are however a couple things you can do to lessen the chances of building something no one will ever use:

1- Put together a very basic clickable demo using free services such as Invisionapp.

2- Put together a simple survey using a service such as TypeForm. Send the demo and survey to as many people outside your personal circle as you can. Get some feedback. Be open to useful or useless criticism.

3- Use your judgment to filter only the good stuff from the feedback you get based on your clickable demo and survey. Refine your vision for what your product needs.

4- Try to get a list of at least 10 people that are committed to paying for your product once it’s ready. If you can get them to pre-order, that’s great. If not, get something in writing, get them to be part of your beta program.

5- Build your product. Get the very basic features out there for version 1. The very features you have people ready to pay for. Don’t get caught up in adding a bunch of unnecessary features no one asked for.

6- Launch your product. Then launch your product again. And then again. And so on.

7- If no one cares after you launched your product again and again, and you are not able to expand past your initial beta users, you might have to consider changing something. But at least up until this point you were very calculated about every step and did the best you could. You have to figure out what else you can do. But don’t let your project turn into a hobby. If you are nearing that point, you are better off trying a completely new idea.

Need any advice or pointers on any of this? Shoot an email to hi@breue.com and say hi! :)