2 builders who never spoke to each other

Seed the product by hand where users already are

Take the thing physically to wherever the users are, a school gate, a conference, a batch of cold emails, and pay a small reward for trying it. Expect most seeds to die quietly with nobody outside ever hearing about them, and expect the tactics that work first to be manual and unscalable.

The method

1. 01

   Assume most seed experiments will fail and keep iterating in private, since nobody outside ever has to hear about the attempts that went nowhere.

2. 02

   Swap the seed venue for whatever suits your market, conferences or a batch of cold emails in place of schools, and run the identical sequence.

3. 03

   Take the seed experiment physically to wherever your users already are and pay them a small reward for downloading and trying it.

4. 04

   Expect your first-customer tactics to be manual and unscalable, and accept that some require months of groundwork before the app exists.

What it returned

• Dozens of Nikita Bier's seed group attempts produced nothing before one version finally caught on inside a single school.

• Jakob argues the approach transfers unchanged to B2B software, to an agency, and to a teen app alike.

• Nikita Bier's team put stands up beside schools and handed out rewards to any student who installed the app and gave it a go.

Sources

• Never Launch – Jakob GreenfeldNikita Bier · jakobgreenfeld.com · Never Launch · 2023-06-25
• Chapter 5: Getting Your First Customers - Tyler TringasTyler Tringas · tylertringas.com · 2017-01-19