A friend and I have been spending weekends working on a product we've been thinking about for a while and almost have an MVP... the obvious next step is to get some people using it. What do we do from there? Where do we really start? We are both pretty recently out of college and are from the midwest, so none of this is really common knowledge here. Whenever we are googling trying to find things out, its just funding funding funding funding. Info on where to look, at what point, etc etc. is confusing for us Any helpful comments would be appreciated TC 80k
Spend time thinking about who has the problem you are solving. Approach them and say you want to solve that problem for them and they can use the tool free and give feedback on how well it works.
Yes, we have done this. We had the idea about 2 years ago, made a (really shitty) version of our product back then /before/ we had put much thought into it. Fast forward to now, we realized how badly we wanted this to exist, and did lots of surveying and talking with as broad a range of people as possible to plan and validate ideas We're hoping to get it into people's hands and have live feedback soon. Following that - will it just be obvious when we need to look to next steps? We are both quite worried about where the limit of what just us two is, because we don't really know, and that has been the most unsettling part to think about so far I think
What's your core domain? Is this a B2C or B2B? You are right. First get some people to use it, better yet pay for your product. Don't worry about funding and all at this time. Once you get there you can start looking at all the options.
b2c. Is there a point where we'll just like.... know its time to figure something out to grow? I'll tell you exactly what we are feeling right now - we are close to a good MVP (we have done quite a lot of surveying to figure out where we want to go with the first stages based on target audience & their needs). We are worried that just the two of us won't realistically be able to make a product too much better than an MVP. There are a lot of things we /want/ to do that we aren't sure if we know how. That thought seems somewhat paralyzing
Ideally you want to find product market fit before you start scaling. B2C is hard to scale without a good amount of funding. Before you take some level of seed funding make sure you have some traction. And know your numbers like how you think things will grow with over next 18 months with the funding, how are you planning to spend it etc. You will need to validate that you're solving a core problem with the MVP you have. I know it's a chicken and egg problem. That's where things get tricky. Is it a market place product (like Uber, Airbnb) or social network? More info will be helpful.