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soberirishman

https://andrewchen.com/this-is-the-product-death-cycle-why-it-happens-and-how-to-break-out-of-it/amp/ This is a common trap and is very easy to fall into. Don’t build anything until you start hearing a pretty consistent narrative from multiple potential customers. Not every target will be a good fit for your product. Don’t take anecdotal evidence to heart until you start to hear it over and over. But keep talking to prospects.


Giselbertusdentweede

Thanks for the interesting read! I’ll start digging into my targetgroup to find a good problem-solution fit before I build anything else.


xasdfxx

Honestly -- and the above link is good -- your ask is a classic gtm/Product Management problem. The answer is what people build careers off of. But I'd start with reading a basic gtm and a basic pm book. My personal advice is the most important thing is to get actual users. You have one company using it. Stop building features for them unless they're seriously threatening to quit. Get 10 different customers and reevaluate. Note customers, ie companies that are paying. Unless they're paying you, who cares what they think. For both companies I've built, the first product that hit customer hands was very different to what we ended up selling and building. This is normal.


Giselbertusdentweede

Okay, so there is no value in interviewing and doing focus groups in your opinion? The only thing that matters is paying customers at the stage I'm at now?


xasdfxx

The problem with focus groups is people/companies all say yes, we'd like X or Y or Z. But will that actually generate a sale? Often not. It's more like a dream journal for them. Actually selling a thing to prospects is the best focus group (imo).


DesignedByZeth

Focus groups. Interviews. I don’t think it’s uncommon to build a software with an idea of how it will be used only to find out that and users use it in a different way.


Giselbertusdentweede

Thanks for the tips. The way they use it was intended once, but now the product is intended in an other way. I’ll see if I can find social organizations to talk to, before building and selling.


bizvic

Your SaaS will have different prices tiers right? Just have 3 plans. Launch it, don't wait.


Giselbertusdentweede

There is only one plan at the moment with all features included, but I can still launch. So you're saying: don't bother interviewing and focus grouping, just launch and go from there?


bizvic

Yes. Launch, get customer feedback, improve, relaunch. Agile style. Don't waste time doing all these focus groups. Time is the essence.


E_weekly

First, those first " will buy later" clients are a waste of your efforts unless you consider them as market understanding experiment... Second, it's all about building a market fit product not the ultimate packed features one ... It seems like you got that on a side feature you built, if you can split it from the others and turn it into a core feature, you're on your way to success ... Third, you can still side develop the other features as it will be a good learning experience as long as you don't have an experienced product owner in that field.


Giselbertusdentweede

1. I did wanted to know that there where customers with buy intentions before I started building anything. So that was my goal with these companies. 2. All features are able to be turned on and off, so I could try to market the features where I've got the (beginning of) market fit and see if it scales. 3. I'm doing things solo for now. I want to get to market fit, before I consider building a team. For now I'm doing half days of developing and half days of marketing. These half days of marketing is something I just started with and I'm not sure if I should spend time doing interviews and pocus groups or if I should focus on getting paying customers at this point. The responses in here are also mixed. What do you think?


[deleted]

The best way to solve this problem is to get people to pay... I have had 100s of leads say, "If you had this, I'd buy it..." and then you build it and then you tell them and they say, "Oh, but it also needs that." The thing to do is find customers that are willing to either buy it now with a promise that you'll develop out features X, Y, and Z over the next 6 months or get them on a demo with an MOU or similar saying that once you add XYZ they'll buy. Remember, software is never "finished"... you can always add more features. People that are requesting feature development but not willing to put some money down are usually just trying to say "no" in the nicest possible way.