The Tech Bubble #4: Validate the problem, not the product!
The harsh lesson of entrepreneurship: "build it and they will come" will never work.
🧠 Startup Wisdom
- “build it and they will come” is completely false and for your sake, you can just consider it will never work. You need to validate first, get in contact with your possible clients, and validate their needs. More than often, you’ll get very valuable insights about their REAL problems.
- make assumptions ABOUT THE PROBLEM and validate them. You don’t need to validate a product, but the existence of a problem. For example, instead of validating the need for a “social media content management app”, you need to validate that “the people in charge of social media accounts have a hard time managing all the content for the accounts they manage” or “they have a hard time figuring out what works and what not, it being a very manual process”.
🏆 Indie Highlights
- FindAffiliates.online is a newsletter that sends affiliate opportunities, which makes money somehow (it’s not clear to me what the monetization process it, but it makes a few bucks). Search engines deal with the “how to find affiliate programs” question very often, so they decided to capitalize on it.
- AutoShorts.ai is a SaaS that makes faceless shorts for social media (reels and TikTok mostly) with ease. They are currently making ~30k USD on a monthly basis, by combining generated graphics with generated voice into mobile resolution videos. Simple and efficient.
✈️ My Journey
- Vuuh - nothing to report on, except that we are now looking for a colleague in Denmark, to join the team as a Customer Success Manager, where they will be the liaison between Vuuh and our enterprise clients.
- The Quest of the Hero - the game is stalled for a bit, since the art upgrade takes a little bit more than anticipated (I will miss my self imposed end-of-may deadline for the demo, so I’ll push it with a month, to the end of June). I started adding more content, and I’ll continue to do so until the art gets delivered and I can start the art upgrade and adding game polish and game feel.
- The Tech Bubble - Slow and steady, no new subscribers, it is kind of stuck at ~20 subscribers, but that’s because I didn’t really actively marketed it. I just post it around 3 or 4 communities when I release a new edition, but that’s all. Doing that is not a good growth channel, so I think I’ll have to explore some more options (including cold contacting potential subscribers).
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