AMA about PMF / Product Discovery (10+ YoE in Product Management)

[sbrodhagen]

If you have questions around product discovery / product management / PMF, I'll do my best to answer them. And if I don't know, someone in this thread may help.

My background: 10+ years in various product roles (PM, Director, Head of Product...) across tech companies / startups in Boston & Silicon Valley. They were as small as a 15-person seed-staged startup and large as a 15k+ global company. Worked in a variety of industries I knew something about (travel) and nothing about (digital identity, real estate appraisals, taxes), which means I had to become an expert in these industries very quickly!

What I'm doing now: product discovery coach located in Seoul, Korea, working with companies from 15-person seed-staged startup up to 2k+ top 10 ecommerce company in Korea. Also indie building a course (digital, self-guided) on teaching the basics of product management to indie hackers / solopreneurs / bootstrappers.

Why I'm doing this:

1) Add value to the community - I enjoy helping people (if I'm able - if not, I'll let you know) and

2) Understand what problems y'all face related to product (which'll help me as I build my course)

3) Why not? lol

 

[cantonboy]

@sbrodhagen Thanks for taking the time to help others

I'm 4 months in as an indie dev working on micro saas, currently ideating after building one product that failed. Been working on finding my next idea for about a month now, have several in the pipeline but nothing that's been validated strongly enough.

Any feedback on my current process of product discovery?

What am I missing? Where can I move faster?

My checklist for an idea:

- Clear problem

- Micro solution (aka one feature)

- Within or near my domain expertise

- At least 1 person said this is a problem for them

- Painkiller

- Clear B2B target audience

- Know how to reach target audience online

- Clear marketing plan

- Not solved for free

- Confident we can build a better version than existing competitors

I keep a list of ideas that come up, have around 70 now. If an idea passed all or most of the above, I spend ~2 hours researching competition and audience online. If it still passes the checklist, I will reach out to potential clients and talk to them, but this takes quite some time, and also will build a landing page (~2 hours) and publish it in the relevant audience groups to see if there's a fit.

Thanks!

 

[sbrodhagen]

@cantonboy Thanks for commenting - just wanna let you know I saw it and will reply in more detail later!

 

[sbrodhagen]

@cantonboy well first off, I think your checklist is quite comprehensive! A minor adjustment I'd make is to add "Clear problem / want" - because a user could be equally willing to pay to solve a problem, or give them something they want. For instance, if I'm in a desert and want water, I'd definitely pay for it! I say this because often times we're focused always only on problems. But there are also plenty of "wants" where users want it.. not like "kinda" want it, but "REALLY WANT IT" and are willing to pay for it.

From your post, it seems you're very detail oriented - makes sense given you're a developer! But one more broad comment I'd make is I think your general process is solid. Is there room for optimizations - sure. But don't we all have room for optimizations? I think the hardest thing is to commit and do, which you've clearly already done.

I think the most helpful thing I can tell you is to keep going, trust the process, and be kind to yourself. I know it sounds a bit weird and touchy-feely to talk about emotions, but emotions is a HUGE part of the indie journey. There are so many days when I wake up and I'm like "Dude... I've gone all in on this, I have a family, and I haven't made any money... and people on Reddit and Twitter seem to be filling up their MRR thermometer while I have nothing..." and it's so easy to spiral downwards.

But what we don't know is that we may be on the cusp of being one launch away from an amazing success. But we may leave prematurely because we sabotaged ourselves mentally. I may be off, because I don't know you very well, so I just wanted to make sure you hear this more in a general sense - I think you're doing awesome to go all in - it takes a ton of courage. And that's already half the battle.

My feeling is that you're the type of person who will keep going and iterating, optimizing and learning along the way, and it's inevitable that you become successful.

Hope that's helpful

PS you said "currently ideating after building one product that failed."

I'd think of it differently. Failure is associated with something bad, but in this world of indie development, what is failure?

Failure is a result that didn't meet your goal, but you will remember even more than a result that met your goal (aka "success.")

When you think of it that way, it's not so much about "success" and "failure" but rather "how much are you learning?"

One way of learning is to read about it, another level of learning is to do it as a hobby, another level is to launch something where the stakes are higher because you're all in on the indie journey.

And we know that launching is the best way of learning. And within launches, I'd argue that launching a project where you didn't meet your goal is one of the BEST ways of extracting learnings from an event.

However, there is an important assumption that underlies what I just said: you extract the learnings. So getting better at extracting learnings from "failures" will get you 10x the learnings, which will help the next launch be even more successful... because you know so much more about the product, the customer, and the market. And over time, that additional learning per launch compounds - compound learning! - which enables you to get deep customer insights that allow you to create amazing products. Competitors can come in and copy the surface-level stuff, but they won't be able to take the insights - and with insights into the users' problems / desires, it's always easy to make additional features / products at a rapid pace to outpace copycats / competitors. And more than that, customers begin trusting you, not just as someone who creates one feature at a time, but as someone who deeply understands them and cares enough about them to continually and consistently create thoughtful solutions.

Wow... sorry - I'm in a rush so I wrote long. If I had more time, I would've edited it down so it's more concise, but gotta head out the door - got a father-daughter date!

 

[cantonboy]

@sbrodhagen Not the answer I wanted, but the answer I needed

Appreciate your chain of thought and inputs, definitely connected with the be kind to myself, problem->problem/strong want, no need to to over optimize the process. Thank you!

Let me know when your product comes along, I'd be happy to try it out.

 

[sbrodhagen]

@cantonboy I'm so glad it could be helpful! It's hard to provide a comment that's truly helpful when it's done online and I don't know much about y'all, but so glad that it was helpful.

And thanks so much for the offer to try out the product. I made a landing page so far (https://themissionary.company) to get signups for people who are interested in joining my EAP (early access program) who can work with me to co-create an online, self-guided course.

I currently have 2 people - looking for about 3 or so more people and then share some ideas of what I'm thinking would be super helpful to teach indie hackers about building great product.

If you're interested in joining the EAP, would love to have you - you can sign up on the Indie PM 101 page.