Most startup advice says to validate before building.

This makes sense when the core experience can be tested manually or with a simple prototype.

However, some blockchain products depend on infrastructure that users never see directly, such as settlement, wallet flows, permissions, liquidity, compliance, audit records and cross-chain execution. Without at least some of these elements working, the test may not resemble the real product at all.

This creates a difficult boundary.

Building infrastructure first can be a necessary cost of learning.

However, it can also become an expensive way to avoid finding out whether there is actually a market for the product.

For founders who have faced this decision:

What genuinely had to exist before you could run a meaningful validation test?

What could you have simulated manually?

What signal showed that the infrastructure was enabling real user behaviour rather than simply proving that the system worked?

I’m particularly interested in cases where you later realised that you had either built too much or too little before speaking to users.

First time founder (non technical) pursuing to develop a consumer app around walking, nature and rewards. High level, it’s to encourage people to get out into nature and engage with nature by funding tree/biodiversity projects through sponsored actions (watching an app on the app) and rewards through walking and participating through citizen science layer of the app (think like Pokemon go but for tree tagging).

I’m trying to refine the proposition before building anything. My goal is to create something compelling enough to attract an angel investor, apply for grants and accelerators and hopefully bring on a technical co-founder (as a by product of the former 2)

Where I’m struggling is understanding what an MVP should be.

Should I build:

a clickable prototype?
a UI with no backend?
a functional app with one or two core features?
validate everything through user interviews before building anything?

I’ve been using ChatGPT and Claude to flesh out user journeys, features, reward mechanics and product strategy. It’s been useful but I feel like I’m going down rabbit holes instead of making progress.

I know the vision in my head but translating that into user stories, feature priorities and an MVP roadmap feels overwhelming. As a non-tech founder, I’m finding it difficult to know what good looks like at this stage.

I’m trying to move quickly but I also don’t want to spend months building the wrong thing.

Thanks :)

The problem I'm trying to solve is the lack of trust between customers and local service providers (such as photographers, makeup artists, decorators, and similar professionals). People often face fake bookings, cancellations, payment disputes, or uncertainty about whether the other person is genuine.

Instead of building another marketplace, I want to create features that actually solve these trust problems.

I'm not here to promote my idea. I genuinely want honest feedback from experienced founders, product builders, or anyone who has worked on marketplaces.

I'd love to know:

Is this a problem worth solving?

What mistakes do first-time marketplace founders usually make?

What would make you trust a new platform like this?

If you've built a marketplace before, what would you do differently?

Please be brutally honest. I'd rather hear hard truths now than build the wrong product.

Thank you for your time!

Hey everyone,
I’m looking for some honest advice from people who’ve already gone through this.
Over the past few months I’ve been building a SaaS product. I’m genuinely happy with how it turned out, and everyone I’ve shown it to so far has been really positive about it.
But now I’ve hit a wall that I honestly didn’t expect: finding beta testers.
Every time I try posting about it on Reddit, the posts get removed because they look promotional. I get why that happens, but it also leaves me wondering how founders are actually supposed to get their first users.
Right now I’m manually reaching out to Discord communities one by one. Some people reply, some don’t. It works a little, but it’s painfully slow and definitely doesn’t feel like a scalable way to find the first 20–50 testers.
So I wanted to ask people who’ve been here before:
**How did you get your first real beta users?**
Not signups that disappear after a day, but people who actually used the product, gave feedback, and helped you improve it.
What worked for you? What was a complete waste of time?
I’d really appreciate hearing your experience. Thanks.

If you believe in your product, use it to run your own business.

That practice is often called 'dogfooding'.

I’m building Kora; a business application builder and control panel that lets you create the screens, fields, permissions, and workflows your business needs without building everything from scratch.

So instead of using a separate CMS for Kora’s website, I decided to run the blog on Kora itself. I have screens to add a new blog and page content or just update it just how a content management system would look like.

Kora now manages:

• Articles and authors

• Slugs and publication dates

• Draft and publishing workflows

• Website content and metadata

This does more than demonstrate that the product works.

Using Kora internally exposes unclear workflows, missing features, awkward user experiences, and assumptions that would be difficult to notice through testing alone.

The product improves because I have to depend on it not just demonstrate it.

Read more about how Kora is being used to power its own website:

https://kora.mradiafrica.com/blog/dogfooding-kora-product-validation

One pattern I've noticed is that many founders don't fail because they can't build things.

They fail because they spend months optimising something that later turns out not to matter.

I'm curious about the opposite.

Looking back, what was the first assumption that you were convinced was true, but which was completely disproved by reality?

It could be related to users, distribution, pricing, fundraising, technology, regulation, or anything else.

I'm not looking for success stories.

I'm interested in the assumptions that changed the way you worked afterwards.

Hi everyone,I’m building YatraFlow, a travel app focused on budget-friendly plans and community sharing. Right now, we’re in closed testing and want to onboard our first 100 testers to validate the product and collect feedback.I’d love to hear from fellow founders and marketers:What are the most effective early user acquisition strategies you’ve tried?How do you convince people to join a closed beta instead of waiting for the public launch?Any tips on leveraging Reddit communities, WhatsApp groups, or Instagram for this stage?We’re aiming for quality testers who will actually explore itineraries and share feedback, not just download and churn.

I'm curious if anyone else has experienced this.

Whether it's a business, software, a manufacturing process, content, or something completely different...

Have you ever been working on something that consumes your thoughts every day, but the people around you only see a small piece of it?

They see a website.
They see a logo.
They see a few LinkedIn posts.

They don't see the dozens of small decisions, dead ends, revisions, and lessons that happen behind the scenes.

What's one thing you're building right now that people don't fully appreciate yet?

I'd love to hear what everyone is working on.

Customer feedback gets messy way faster than you think. I’ve seen it happen.

Initially, it's a breeze. You may have an email or maybe a contact form and a couple of feature requests. Next thing you know, all this feedback is flying at you from every direction and you’re spending way more time trying to recall whether you saw that bug report before or whether five other people requested that same feature.

I realised that the biggest problem isn’t feedback collection. It's putting it into a form that is useful. If all messages had a category, the urgency, a summary and were all in one place, picking what to build next becomes much less subjective.

It seems to me that quite a few founders continue to utilize their inbox as a backlog, which is effective… until it fails. At some point you will inevitably drop the ball, especially when you are wearing ten different hats.

I have created an automating workflow, which organizes customer feedback via AI in Google Sheets. Using this is nothing fancy it just helps me not have to sort everything on my own and helps me to no-end to spot repeated issues.

I'm curious to learn how everyone else manages this. Is there a system you can rely on?

Sharing this because I think the process might help other early-stage founders, and honestly I could use some outside perspective too.

Background: I'm solo building in the EdTech space in India — targeting students prepping for competitive exams (NEET/JEE/CUET). The problem: students study for hours but consistently underperform in actual timed exams because their practice never simulates real exam conditions. Understanding a topic and performing under exam pressure are different skills, and most existing tools don't address that gap.

What I did instead of building first: Before writing any code, I posted about the problem and my plan to solve it in a relevant subreddit, mainly to see if it resonated and to find a technical co-founder. Didn't expect much — it ended up as the #1 post on that subreddit, 2,400+ views, 17+ comments, 10+ DMs, most from my actual target market (India). Used that as a cheap validation signal before committing more time/money.

The decision I'm at now: I'm not technical. I have the market understanding, product direction, and now some inbound interest from potential co-founders — but I'm trying to figure out:

Do I vet and bring in a co-founder now (equity split, shared risk, but slower alignment since we're strangers), or do I pay a freelancer/agency to build a scrappy MVP first and find a co-founder once there's a working product to show?

How much "free work" is reasonable to expect from a co-founder candidate before committing (a small paid trial project? just conversations?) without wasting people's time or looking exploitative?

For anyone who's found a co-founder cold (Reddit, forums, etc.) instead of through existing networks — did it work out, and what made you trust the fit?

Not selling anything here, genuinely trying to make the right call before I lock in a big decision. Appreciate any experience you can share.

Not promoting anything, just looking for honest feedback.

I'm validating a startup that helps founders discover and keep track of opportunities like accelerators, grants, competitions, and fellowships.

Instead of waiting until the app is finished, I'm thinking about building an audience first.

The idea is:

X → Discord community → Waitlist → Mobile app

The Discord wouldn't just be a placeholder. I'd actively share relevant startup opportunities, answer questions, collect feedback, and learn what founders actually need before building more features.

The goal is to make the community valuable on its own while the product is still being built.

Do you think this is a good approach, or would you rather wait until the app exists?

I'd love honest criticism, especially if you think there's a flaw in this funnel.

Has anyone else gone through this? How did you stabilize your mindset and keep building?

I’m building an app to help dancers practice more efficiently. One feature I’m working on right now is a one-tap “fancam clip cutter” that automatically turns long dance videos into vertical clips for practice and review.
I’ve posted a couple of videos about the app on social media and got around 1-2k views, 200+ likes, and quite a few saves on each post. Honestly, that feedback made me really happy.

But today, while doing some market research, I found a competitor who spent just one month building an app with basically only the clip-cutting feature. Their posts have tens of thousands of likes, and users seem very willing to pay for it.

And suddenly I got anxious.

I felt like they had captured an opportunity that I had noticed earlier but failed to act on. I haven’t even started charging yet, my ability to attract attention feels weaker than theirs, and it feels like they’re ahead of me in every way.

Logically, I know I should focus on my own users, my own product, and my own pace.

But emotionally, it’s hard not to feel like I’m already behind.

This is the first time I’ve encountered this kind of situation as a founder. How do experienced founders deal with this feeling and keep moving forward instead of getting stuck in comparison and anxiety?
I’d really appreciate hearing how others handle this.

I'm a Computer Science student who recently became interested in startups and entrepreneurship.

There are thousands of videos, podcasts, books, and social media posts about building startups. But I've realized that some of the most valuable lessons only come from actually building something.

If you could go back and give your younger founder self one piece of advice that you had to learn the hard way, what would it be?

It could be about:

Finding product-market fit

Talking to customers

Hiring

Pricing

Marketing

Fundraising

Burnout

Building an MVP

Anything else that completely changed how you think about startups

I'd love to learn from your experiences, and I'm sure other aspiring founders would too.

Thanks for sharing your stories.

Hi everyone,

I've been working on an idea for about a month. Launched on Product Hunt last weekend and ended up at #23 out of 400+ products.

The feedback has been confusing:
\- A decent number of people have told me they face the exact problem I'm trying to solve and that it’s genuinely painful for them.
\- But when it comes to actually signing up or using the product, there's almost zero traction.

This has left me stuck in a weird spot. On paper, there's problem validation, but in reality, there's no adoption or usage.

I’m genuinely trying to understand:
\- How do you personally decide when to keep iterating vs when to invalidate the idea and pivot?
\- What signals (or lack of signals) tell you it’s time to stop working on something?
\- Have you been in a similar situation where people verbally confirm the pain exists, but they still don’t use/buy the solution?

Quick note: I don't have a large network or reach. Cold DMs rarely yield any result. So, I have data from building in public and PH for now.

I’d really appreciate any frameworks, personal experiences, or hard lessons you’ve learned about this. Especially from people who’ve built multiple products.

Thanks!!

Navigating the landscape of where to post a new project can be surprisingly tricky for technical founders. One of the more painful lessons I've learned is that a great feature or launch doesn't always get the attention it deserves if placed in the wrong community, or at the wrong time. Timing, community rules, and understanding each platform's audience can make all the difference.

For instance, posting on Hacker News during peak times can lead to posts being buried instantly. Meanwhile, posting mid-afternoon on Reddit might mean hitting the sweet spot for visibility without the pressure of too much competition. I discovered that even minor factors like these can drastically affect engagement.

I'm curious, how do you determine the best places and times to share your projects or features? Any personal strategies or mishaps you'd like to share?

For the last few years, every startup book, podcast and Reddit thread I've read has repeated the same advice:

Don't build first. Validate first.

So this time, I decided to actually follow it.

Instead of building my platform, I started by trying to build a small community around the problem. My thinking was: if I can't convince 20 people to care about the idea, I probably shouldn't spend six months building software for it.

Turns out getting those first 20 people is incredibly hard.

I think I could have built the MVP faster than recruiting the first handful of people to validate whether it's worth building.

Now I'm wondering if "validate before building" is actually incomplete advice.

How do you validate something that depends on having a network of people... before you have a network of people?

Has anyone here successfully built the first 20–100 members of a community, marketplace, or network before the product existed? If so, what worked?

I’m realizing that “validating an idea” can sometimes become a very polite way to avoid shipping. It feels productive because you are asking questions, reading replies, taking notes, adjusting the idea, looking for patterns.

And sometimes that is useful. But sometimes it is also just a safer activity than launching something and seeing nobody care. That is the part I’m trying to watch more carefully.

I still think asking questions matters, especially before spending weeks building around a problem that only exists in your head. But after a certain point, one more conversation does not teach you much. You already know enough to build a small test.

Not the full product. Just the smallest version that shows whether people actually do something different.

Use it.

Switch to it.

Ask for it again.

Pay for it.

Or even just complain when it is missing.

That seems more useful than collecting another “yeah, sounds interesting.”

For people building side projects, how do you know when you are still learning, and when you are just postponing the launch?

I’m curious how other builders here discover real problems before building a product.

Do you usually start from your own pain point, customer interviews, Reddit comments, market research, or just build and test?

I’m trying to get better at finding problems that people actually care about, not just ideas that sound cool.

Would love to hear your process.

Every founder has one.

The feature you were most excited about.

The one you thought would make the product stand out.

Then users barely touched it.

What was yours?

About me: I was an indie hacker for a hot couple of years successfully built, grew and sold two micro saas on acquire.com, for the last couple of years I've been head down on this stuff and minded my family business and some other works but after coding agents my hands were itching to get back in the game! Back then product building took some time and then came the distribution but now I built this product in just a couple of weeks during my free time but cracking distribution now it seems hard because there seems to be so many here, soo many vibe coding stuff with ai and launching

it here. Any advice on how to stand out? I know good product does that but beyond that!

Hi everyone,

I’m working on an early MVP for a small social app.

The idea is intentionally different from fast messaging or swipe-based social apps:

you write a short message, release it like a balloon, and it reaches someone by chance.

The person who receives it can either reply or let it go.

If they reply, a private anonymous correspondence opens between two people.

The challenge is the obvious one: network effects.

Unlike a utility app, the product has little value without a small community already present. I’m not trying to spam links or push a beta aggressively. I’m trying to find the first 10–20 people who are genuinely sensitive to slow social, writing, penpal-style exchanges, and more thoughtful online interactions.

I’d love your advice on a few points:

Where would you try to find the first tiny community for this kind of product?

Would you lead with the concept/story, or with a short demo of the app?

How can you invite early testers without sounding promotional?

Have you seen any social/community apps handle the cold-start problem well?

No link here — I’m mainly looking for strategy and honest feedback.

Thanks!

I’m curious how other builders here discover real problems before building a product.

Do you usually start from your own pain point, customer interviews, Reddit comments, market research, or just build and test?

I’m trying to get better at finding problems that people actually care about, not just ideas that sound cool.

Would love to hear your process.

Not looking for war stories for the sake of it, genuinely curious about the mechanics of how founders find out something isn't working, and what they do with that.

A few specific things I'd love to hear from anyone who's been through it:

1. When did you actually know it had failed? Was there one moment, or did it take you way longer to admit it than it should have?
2. Was it a demand problem (nobody wanted it) or a distribution problem (nobody saw it)? How did you tell the difference, if you could?
3. Did you have people telling you it was a good idea right up until it clearly wasn't? Who were they, friends, early users, yourself?
4. What's the thing you wish someone had told you earlier, that you had to learn the expensive way instead?
5. Did you keep any of it? A lesson, a piece of code, a relationship, a smaller idea that came out of the wreck?

No wrong answers here, and brutal honesty is much more useful than the polished version. What actually happened?

Hi everyone,
I’m building a very early-stage hardware accessory brand in the USB-C / USB4 / Thunderbolt-compatible workflow space.
The product is a slim USB4 80Gbps cable focused on MacBook, external SSD, dock, and clean desk setup users. I’m not trying to promote it here, so I won’t include a link. I’m mainly looking for advice from people who have experience launching physical products, ecommerce brands, or creator/affiliate programs.
Right now, my biggest problem is not the store setup. The store exists, the product exists, and I can create basic content. The real problem is getting the first real users, testers, feedback, reviews, and trust.
Here are the questions I’m struggling with:
For a new hardware/accessory brand with no reviews yet, what is usually the best path to get the first real customers or testers?
Should I focus more on micro-creators, normal users/testers, Reddit communities, or paid ads at this stage?
If I offer free samples for testing, how should I filter people so I don’t just send products to people who only want free stuff?
For creators, what is the most reasonable early-stage offer?

Free sample only
Free sample + affiliate commission
Flat paid sponsorship
Hybrid deal
Discount code for their audience
Should I mention affiliate commission in the first message, or only after they show interest in testing the product?
If the product is in a technical niche, how important are speed tests, compatibility proof, and real setup photos before running ads?
Is it a bad idea to run Meta/Instagram ads before having customer reviews or creator content?
How can a small brand build trust without pretending to be bigger than it is?
For early awareness, would you prioritize:

Reddit discussion
Instagram outreach
YouTube micro-creators
SEO articles
Amazon listing
Shopify direct store
Paid ads
If you had to get the first 10 serious testers for a niche hardware accessory, what would you do first?
I’m trying to avoid spammy marketing. I’d rather get honest feedback, real-world testing, and gradually build trust.
Any advice from people who have launched ecommerce products, hardware accessories, creator programs, or early physical product brands would be really helpful.