I'll tell you exactly how we did it, but first you should know:

the bar is a lot lower than you think.

- Most people aren't following a clear process for building and launching their products.

- Most people quit trying after 2-5 months.

- Most people don't have a plan.

You don't need to work 70 hour weeks and be an expert to succeed. You just need to not make the common mistakes and stick around for a bit longer. That's enough.

Now, here's exactly how we went from 0 users and 0 traffic to 1600+ users with 80 days of effort and $0 spent:

Step 1 - Foundation:

- You shouldn't build any random idea. Your idea needs to be validated or else it won't resonate.

- We used the Reddit to determine market demand for a few different ideas.

- We found one idea that indicated market demand and that we felt excited about.

- So we started building right? Nope.

- We reached out to potential users about the idea we had and kindly asked if they would help us by answering 6-7 questions. We found these people on Reddit and X.

- Their answers indicated that people had the problem we were looking to solve and that they were interested in the product we would build, and even be ready to pay for it if it was good.

- Great. Now we build.

Step 2 - Building:

- This is the easy part. We knew what we should focus on from the feedback so we let that guide our building.

- We built fast. 30-45 days for the MVP.

- We made sure that our MVP actually solved the problem we had identified.

- That's it. Time to market this MVP and see if we can get some users.

Step 3 - Marketing:

- First we set a clear goal. We wanted as much feedback as possible so we were going to need active users. Let's say 20 active users, that was our goal.

- Then we selected 2 marketing channels we believed in. What marketing channel you select depends on where your potential users are and who they are. For us it was Reddit and X.

- Then we set daily volume targets. For example, post 50 replies on X on relevant posts.

- So we had our daily targets, meaning we knew exactly what to do every day. We thought it would be reasonable to expect that we can hit our goal of 20 active users in 2 weeks.

- Then we just executed our marketing plan. It was easy, because we knew what to do every day. No questions.

- 10 days later we were at 70+ users. We had hit our goal.

- The feedback on our MVP was good so we got the green light to build the full product. Let’s go!

Step 4 - Build again:

- This time we had much better feedback.

- We removed everything that was bad.

- Added some good things.

- And made sure we were still focused on solving the core problem.

- Voila, we had a pretty awesome product at this point that users actually want.

- Time for the official launch.

Step 5 - The launch

- Since our product is made for founders, Product Hunt was the perfect place for us to launch.

- We prepared a demo of the product, wrote a launch post, said our prayers, and then we launched.

- During the launch, we tried to drive as much traffic to our Product Hunt page as we could.

- This meant creating a lot of content on X and Reddit.

- It was a close race for the top 5 spots. Our small team of 2 brothers vs the large VC backed companies.

- In the end we claimed the 4th spot on product of the day with 500+ upvotes. Success!

- You can find the launch post here: https://www.producthunt.com/products/buildpad#buildpad

Continuation in the comments...

Thanks for sharing your story. Your validation process matches up with a lot of startup stories I've read and if your tool facilitates all that, there will be a lot more successful startups (and fewer wasted dead end projects) in the world.

What I'm seeing is that instead of making a product for the sake of making a product, like it feels like a ton of startups are doing, you tried to make something people want. By the way, congratulations!

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