How to determine if a problem you saw in a market it’s not just on your mind without having to build and design anything.
I recently had an idea about building a music streaming player that compiles all the recommendations people made through the years on an electronic music forum without them having to manually browse, find, and play the songs individually.
The idea came from a pain point observed in that forum where people have to manually check everything that people are recommending. The current state looked something like this:
Open forum
Browse through 400+ pages of content
Copy and paste the text from the thread
Go on Discogs/YouTube/Spotify/Soundcloud and try to look for that particular song.
Repeat / Repeat / Repeat
Based on this functional pain point observed I decided to give it a try.
In order to validate that what I’m thinking to build really represents a problem for someone else, I decided to focus on just the users of that particular thread. Starting super small.
I’m doing this by myself, basically doing everything necessary to validate it.
Again, the main goal is to see if anyone else is experiencing the same thing. The budget is <100$.
Usually, every time I start to tackle a new opportunity I create a Lean canvas (see template here). This allows me to quickly to a brain dump without getting lost in too many details. It takes max 30 min.
This allows me to see more clearly from a business perspective if my idea is worth pursuing.
Next, I try to understand the product risks:
Usually, at the start, I focus on just the value and viability risks, but in this particular case, things went a bit differently.
(Short side-note) I had built a music player in the past and was thinking that I might be able to quickly build this idea and maybe use the solution space to discover the problem space. I know it’s counter-intuitive but sometimes if building what I have in mind takes less time to build, then it’s worth doing because you get more valuable feedback from the live product.
So, on the side, I started to check if I could build it. ChatGPT was my developer friend.
Finally, after a few hours of messing around with chatGPT, I was sure that my idea was feasible and that I could build it.
Next, in parallel with building the product, I started to reach out to people sharing with them the problem I’m having by first trying to get an estimation of how many people are following this particular thread of the forum. Basically, getting an estimation of the market size, so I started asking questions like “Is there anyone else who’s enjoying this but never shared anything?” “Has anyone heard of this thread?”
Next, I started to get a feeling that someone else had a similar issue with mine by asking things like “I would love to have a way to listen to all the great stuff shared over these years but is such a pain in the a** to use it”.
Then I started to DM people sharing with them that I have built a little tool that helps them solve that problem and let me know if they wanna give it a try”.
Now I’m starting to get some answers back:
People are not that aware of that thread even if it has a long history of almost 14 years and 30k+ tracks. However, there are still active users there who are constantly sharing.
A few people replied saying that would be cool if I shared with them the player.
The insights above and the conversations I had, led me to pivot a bit and widen a bit the potential market, the problem seemed a bit too niche.
Now I’m planning to refine a bit the value proposition and try it again by reaching out to more people and getting their feedback.
If I get more positive signals then I will start to create some ads and build a landing page for lead generation.
As you observe, you do not really need to build something in order to see if anyone has the problem you think they have. It’s more about discovering problems, messaging, distribution, value, and less about UX/UI/Development/Brand and so on…
Leave a Reply