HN user
Tried this just now and there seems to be some async feedback issue. Had to click the action button on the homepage a few times to make it actually do something (so perhaps you start the process but don’t change the UI). Once the page changed it just went into a continuous spinner with, as if it was stuck).
I’ve tried it from safari on an iphone.
For a SaaS we launched about 7 years ago, the initial people came from LinkedIn, so my suggestion would be to look for people on linkedin that fit your target profile and ask them for a bit of time to discuss their workflow/issues and how they are fixing them now. If not linkedin, find where people that fit your target profile hang out online (is it a sub-reddit, is there some kind of forum?). if not online, try to find an actual conference and visit it, chat to people in the hallways.
Don't pitch the product, talk about researching for the product (which is what you'll be doing anyway, but some of those initial interview people may become your best advocates). People that genuinely have the problem you want to solve will want to help.
Steve Blank has a nice segment on the ideal people to involve here in The Four Steps to the Epiphany, calling them Earlyvangelists. One big thing to look for is that people have identified a problem that you're solving, tried to solve it themselves, and in an ideal scenario have a budget for a better solution (see https://www.votito.com/methods/earlyvangelists/ for more).
_The Mom Test_ book is an excellent interview guide for this stage, and you'll figure out the questions to ask from there. here's my checklist from when I used it a while ago (not verbatim from the book, so best to actually read the book).
- how do you currently solve X - and how much time do you spend on it? can you show me how you do it? - what happened the last time X came up? talk me through the last time it happened. - if not solved, why not - have you tried finding a different solution for it? - why do you bother doing it? - what are the implications of that? - what else have you tried? - who else should I talk to? - anything else I should have asked?
to find if the problem you want to solve even matters at all: - how much time do you spend on it each week? - which tools and services are you using for it? - what have you already tried doing to improve this? - what are the 3 big things you’re trying to fix or improve right now?
ultimately product success metrics such as market share and revenue, but those are lagging and might not be measurable over a 4 month period (the original study duration). beyond that, behaviour changes for users (is the product more useful?). those can be measured more frequently and can be compared to the previous period. if not that, than delivery output metrics such as cycle time for development (are we delivering faster?) paired with failure demand (% of tickets we thought were delivered but required rework/fixing). PRs are tied to effort/delivery process inputs, not outputs.
PRs measure effort, not outcome, so it’s a measure that their developers+ai spent 24% more effort than just devs previously (assuming the average work that went into a PR didn’t change, which is also a big assumption. maybe those PRs were smaller or more complex on average than before). so the uplift isn’t really tracked here. time to market, average cycle time per change, number of incidents per ticket released etc would be more meaningful metrics for uplift
A big shift over the last year or two seems to be market access for small/indie products. I built and launched two SaaS systems (one started 13 years ago, one 7 years ago) sucessfully getting customers through organic search from Google. Trying to do something like that again and the difference is huge. There is a lot more competition everywhere, content on Google seems to get impressions but not clicks, and it just looks like the market is overcrowded.
The study unfortunately looks only at individual productivity, not any org gains, and the big claim in the PDF is that adopters "merge roughly 24% more pull requests" over a four month period. not exactly headline-making material. There's no data in the paper whether those 24% extra pull requests actually added anything more valuable or not.
(using claude code) I force the agent to work in steps where each step changes no more than 4-5 files, where each step has some observable result, ideally unit testable or e2e integration testable, and do a quick git diff/git add after each step. I have a bunch of deterministic checks (custom linting rules) that verify pretty much any repeatable comment I had to provide to Claude code over time (Claude is also writing/maintaining the rules, and unit tests for the rules) so I can focus on identifying new stuff. It took a few months to grow this rule set but now it exists things work pretty smoothly.
0. product developer/consultant
1. macbook pro, generally maxed out spec at time of purchase
2. 5-6 years
combining idea banks/feature request boards with popular product management surveys, with the idea to help people discover better signals from the noise of user feedback, and then follow up with interested users for in-depth research. We used to do this combining several tools for a SaaS product that we sold last year, and I thought it would be useful to build a unified service so everything is in a single tool. An early version (useful but not fully polished) is live at https://www.votito.com