In 2020 I was pissed off... I was working on an Instagram tool that had hundreds of users - all keeping me up at night through live chat.

Over 80% of the conversations were people requesting features or reporting bugs. Most of the time we just forgot what was said, other times it was scattered across Slack channels, Excel spreadsheets, and chaotic Trello boards.

We desperately needed a better solution to keep our customers happy, and more importantly, let me watch the new Kanye documentary without having to respond to chat messages.

So I started looking for solutions and found one - public feedback boards. With feedback boards, your users can post all their input on a public board. All of it will be conveniently gathered together in a single organized place for you to make sense of it. Users can upvote features they like, and it also notifies them when you respond to posts or launch a new feature.

We found our first customers from making posts on websites like IndieHackers, Reddit. Many cold emails were involved as well.

Sites like Betalist and Product Hunt were also really good.

We're running Google Ads to drive traffic and trying to be active on twitter. Writing blog posts, etc.

A really surprising source of customers has been alternativeto.net. The traffic from there tends to be very high quality since people are actually looking for an alternative to a product they are looking for.

Validate your idea before building.
This has been said a thousand times, but I keep seeing people ignore that advice.

Don't just ask questions like: 'do you like this idea?' Read 'The Mom Test' to get an idea of what questions are good and not.

I like this. No market = no product.