Ask HN: How to Market Before Building?

Promoting something you haven't built yet is kinda impossible. If you don't know what your product is capable of or what it will look like in the future, how are you supposed to logically convince users to consider your product?

lol this is exactly what im trying to understand, you hear this phrase sometimes in yt videos. I mean it doesnt make sense unless probably you are selling a t-shirt for your community, posting a pic of the product to see their reaction, but in the tech industry it seems impossible

Unironically, by powerpoint (for a B2B product)

The point is to talk to your potential market/customers before you build it. You can do many things though even if you have 0 audience today:

- Setup a Landing Page and collect Emails on a waitlist

- Blog Posts on relevant keywords/topics. Do 2-3 a month at the least. quality over quantity.

- Do Outbound sales. Find your potential customers using tools like Apollo, Linkedin etc. No easy way here. You have to grind a bit. Make a list. Reach out to them. Try to start a conversation

- Look on Reddit/sub-reddits in your area of interest. See if you can find potential customers there. One way is to reply to related topics and build authority. Takes time.

- Show some MVP/screenshots/mockups of the product to your potential audience on social media etc. Post it everywhere. Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook at the minimum. If B2C, may be even do Insta and TikTok

- Use Youtube as a channel. Create content in your niche.

All of these are hard to do and there is no magic wand for them. But you have to do these to have a chance especially in today's crowded market where every problem has 100s of solutions already in some form. Even harder challenge is that you won't have anyone to help in the beginning except may be a cofounder if you have one. Everything has to be done by you/cofounders.

For B2B, you line up calls and show mockups or clickable prototypes (Figma if you’ve got the skills / budget, Balsamiq or similar otherwise). From there, if it’s compelling enough, you should be able to get a contract signed (wouldn’t bother with LOIs personally).

I can speak from my experience building a B2C product. Our traction from when we marketed (organically only) before our MVP was out was mainly though Reddit. Once we had a working prototype, X showed some help. Alongside this, I build from cafes where I continuously speak to potential users and collect their feedback

It happens all the time in consulting. You ask the user what product they want. Or you propose something in a power point and it gets commented on.

I'd say the question is what marketing channel.

You can't really do this with a Steam game; you'd need at least screenshots first.

If it's direct sales, you can do this with a powerpoint, as many have commented.

If it's via digital marketing, you can just test that they're clicking the ads. Or funnel them to a landing page where they click to buy or join a waitlist. Email marketing tends to convert very well to sales. If you can, you'd want to funnel everything into a squeeze page, where the only thing they can do is enter their email. Don't do it on a pop-up. You'll probably want to see where they're joining the waitlist from - is it under the hero banner, or the explanation, or the pricing page. This lets you know what they really care about.

This might be the old way of doing things though. More modern is to build a social media presence or get in front of someone else's and just propose something. If nobody is excited, then there's probably no market for it.