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independence2 unconnected · 2 more authors in those circles
applies to

b2b and consumer, no audience needed

confidence

high

evidence

5 claims · 5 articles · 2 receipts

window

2016-08-25 → 2020-06-11

2 builders who never spoke to each other

Mine the community for the complaint worth building on

Read the room as a source of problems rather than as an audience: the pain that keeps recurring in a forum, the requests under the most watched videos in a niche, the capability users keep begging a big platform for. Watching what a competitor's outage does to sentiment gives the same unguarded read on how much people actually depend on something.

The method

  1. 01

    Use the community first as research: watch which content members share and engage with, then make more of what you saw work.

  2. 02

    Watch for the complaint that keeps recurring in that community and write one post per recurring pain, because a widely felt pain gets shared by the people it helped.

  3. 03

    Read the comments under the most watched videos in a niche as a list of problems people want solved and products they want compared.

  4. 04

    Mine a fast-growing platform's forums and its mentions on Twitter for the one capability users keep begging for that the platform itself shows no sign of building.

  5. 05

    Search social media for reactions to a competitor's downtime to get unguarded sentiment about how much people actually depend on it.

What it returned

  • $77,000

    Glen Allsopp found tiny house channels whose subscriber counts run into the hundreds of thousands, where commenters asked build questions, and one featured house cost $77,000, so buyers there do spend.

  • Searching Twitter for reports of Slack being down mostly turns up people pleased that they can finally get some work done.

Sources

the second source

Three plays a week, for the phase you are in

No roundup of links, no news. Three tactics more than one builder arrived at separately, with the numbers each one returned and the disagreements left in.

One email a week. Unsubscribe in one click, and the address is used for this and nothing else.

More in social

all social plays

the second source

Three plays a week, for the phase you are in

No roundup of links, no news. Three tactics more than one builder arrived at separately, with the numbers each one returned and the disagreements left in.

963 corroborated plays to draw from · 3 a week

One email a week. Unsubscribe in one click, and the address is used for this and nothing else.