From the perspective of a fledgling business creating a new product, nothing matters more than users. Not even the product. You absolutely must get your idea in front of people who would use it before you can start your journey to product market fit. I won't rehash that here. Instead, I want to focus on where to find those users and what to do if you can't find them.
Make sure you aren't over complicating this. Solve a problem someone has and tell them about your solution. You may already know people who would buy a new product so go discover what it is they need.
Find someone in pain. Painkillers sells themselves.
Many of my products start with an idea that X would be cool. I build the product and then I realize I need to find someone who needs X. The first time I scratched my head wondering why my hackernews post didn't bring users flooding in. The next time I tweeted a few times and still 🦗🦗🦗. And while my distribution definitely left something to be desired, my real problem was I didn't know whose pain I was solving. I was expecting people to see the solution to their pain in my product. I could have shown something useless or poorly communicated to everyone on the planet and I'd still have no users.
Rather than building something and trying to reverse engineer who would benefit, you should
- identify someone with a problem
- talk with the person to discover if the problem is worth solving
- identify how this person's peers are solving the problem
If you get all the way to step 3 and the person's peers are happy with their solution you should show it to your partner in this exercise and see if that solves their problem. If the peers aren't happy or your partner has a real reason that the solution doesn't work for them then you can
- work with them to build a solution
- take the solution to those same peers you interviewed before
A surefire way to get a user for a product is to get it in front of people whose problem it solves.
The tar pit here is inventing a pain. By focusing on people with problems instead of problems people have we can make sure we're getting signal that we're building something useful.
Hack: Talk to the people you already know. Ask them what things they have to do that they dread.
Build for an audience of One
If your hair is on fire, put it out! You can absolutely build a product that solves your problem. Doing so comes with a lot of benefits. Customer interviews can happen any time you're free. You can get feedback on the product just by using it. You can skip a ton of communication overhead.
But it has some downsides to. You can build something your idealized self will use but you put on a shelf. You can have a hyper specialized problem no one else has. You can get so excited to build you don't search for prior art.
If you avoid the downsides, building for yourself is a great way to get your first customer and understand the type of person who would use your product.
Building for yourself requires that you are honest with yourself and that you have a problem worth solving. Build the thing you wish badly you could buy but can't. Refine it to the smallest unit of value and add the features as you need them.
Hack: Talk to other people who have the same problem you to validate the problem.
Reinvent the wheel
If you identify a product that already has a userbase and you can replicate that product then you've found group of potential users. The current, previous, and potential users of the product you're replicating.
Warning: This does not work when the userbase is the moat. You can not start the next linkedin simply by out competing them at their own game. You have to come at it from another angle.
This isn't a magic fix and you still have to find that first user but now you have a map. Explore your competition's marketing strategy, snoop on their socials, and read their reviews. Discover where they are posting, how they are speaking to their customers about the problem, and what is lacking in their product.
With this research you may have identified some users by name. You may have discovered a type of business that relies heavily on products like yours. You may be able to build a customer profile. Take this information and find a way to connect with these people. You can network, cold call, attend a trade show, or shout about it from the rooftops now that you speak the right language.