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independence3 unconnected · 1 more author in those circles
applies to

b2b and consumer, no audience needed

confidence

high

evidence

8 claims · 8 articles · 4 receipts

window

2017-04-07 → 2023-10-28

3 builders who never spoke to each other

Let the reaction to your posts pick the product

Publish small useful things across a range of topics and treat the response as the market test: the question people keep asking, the post that got shared, the tutorial series that drew a crowd. It is a far cheaper experiment than building the wrong thing, and the eventual product is usually the one the audience kept asking about rather than the one you were working on.

The method

  1. 01

    Work in public for months before launch so audience response tells you whether the idea lands - engagement on small public lessons is the pre-launch signal.

  2. 02

    Read the pre-launch reaction as data: whether people sound excited and whether anticipation is building tells you if the hypothesis holds.

  3. 03

    Use which of your posts people respond to as a cheap experiment for choosing which market or audience to build for later.

  4. 04

    Let the questions your posts attract decide what the first product is, instead of guessing at an offer before you have an audience.

  5. 05

    Build side projects in public and pay attention to what your audience reacts to rather than what you're building - the real product is often the thing they keep asking about.

What it returned

  • 1

    Dan Shipper of Every posted himself attempting to rebuild ChatGPT with a handful of prompts. The post did 1.2M views, which validated demand, and he launched the course afterwards.

  • Steve Schoger and Adam Wathan posted design and code tips for a year before launching, and hundreds of people engaging with those tweets gave them confidence.

  • The complaints Natoli kept hearing concerned prospecting and pipeline building, so he built a Sales Prospecting Bootcamp to answer them.

  • Adam Wathan livestreamed himself building a Gumroad competitor and noticed viewers cared about how he wrote CSS, which became Tailwind CSS.

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.

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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.