3 Easy Ways to Market and Get Feedback for Your Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
Once you have your great Minimum Viable Product (MVP) or Proof of Concept (POC) up-and-running what should you do next? Are you looking for ways to get additional exposure? How can you get your web product into the hands of the public? Beyond your family and beyond your friends? How can you get objective eyeballs for feedback and for product marketing? Well, here are 3 great sites where you can do just that. These are great starting points to get a simple SaaS application into the hands of the public.
Hacker News — Show | Hacker News
“Show | Hacker News” is my favorite. News. Hacker News is a Y-Combinator product and has high credibility amongst the tech and the maker community. It gets millions of daily views. This is a great place to gauge public reaction to your product. If you are lucky, you will get focused, technical and introspective feedback.
I submitted my own toy project to Show | Hacker News a while back. It is called “Analyze Your Next Title” and it will quantitatively analyze a title and compare it to tens of thousands of Medium and Amazon Best Selling titles. It was thrilling to see the spike in traffic. My site, ViralML.com which hosts the title analyzer application, normally gets 200–300 visits a day, I got over 500 in the first few hours. Though it was an awesome feeling, I, unfortunately, didn’t get any feedback. Which brings us to the next point, when you submit your project, make sure you create a strong “hook”. Tell your potential visitors how they will benefit from this product, what they will learn, and how they will grow. I am not sure if my hook was bad, if they didn’t like or understand the product, or if they found it buggy — I’ll try again!
Products by Indie Hackers
“Products by Indie Hackers” is another site very popular with the tech and makers community. It is first and foremost Courtland Allen’s great podcast where he interviews successful entrepreneurs and their SaaS companies. But it also has a vibrant and generous message board designed so that you can show off your product and get feedback.
Product Hunt
And finally, there’s “Product Hunt”. It has over half-a-million users, probably more as I haven’t seen the latest numbers. If your product is more polished and ready to go, submitting it to Product Hunt may get you a whole lot of exposure.
Product Hunt is also a great site to see what others are producing in the SaaS, On-Prem, etc. space. The front page will highlight some of the most popular trending ones.
Final Words
The point here is there are easy ways to market a side project without leaving the comfort of your chair or lifting a phone! This is good news for the introvert in all of us!
