Ask HN: I spent months building an app and now I don't know how to get users
Firstly, I believe people will buy almost anything if it&#x27;s positioned and marketed to them correctly, so I wouldn&#x27;t get discouraged if there are similar things out there at this stage. The trick is building and positioning a product with specific features that can withstand the buyer question of &quot;what is my next best alternative&quot; and ultimately choosing you. That, plus good unit economics, is how you build a foundation for a strong business. Most likely you&#x27;ll overhaul the entire app and pivot 2-4 times before you get a strong product market fit, so be open to change (which is why building the entire thing before validating need is a great way to get your heart broken when it needs to be overhauled).<p>For Taskwer:<p>&gt; I didn&#x27;t listen to it<p>I&#x27;d start there, and introspect as to why you ignored the advice of the experts and experienced people. Validating market need before building anything you intend to sustainably sell is always a good idea. This will help you next time around and help you better understand yourself.<p>&gt; At the same time, salaries didn&#x27;t keep up with inflation, and more and more people started to struggle financially.<p>This is ground zero, the starting point, step one, etc. You think you&#x27;ve identified the problem. Who is struggling, exactly? Are you learning about this from a Business Insider or New Yorker article, or do you actually have a line of sight to a real person in your life this macro economic thing is hitting directly? You need to be able to contact at least one, but ideally 10 people to start, who are &quot;struggling&quot; and need to do odd-jobs or service work to make ends meet. Without them, you don&#x27;t have a need and subsequently you don&#x27;t have a service or an app that will go anywhere in its current form. You could perform (or purchase) the services yourself for the time being while you figure out who is more important to market to and how to market to them (my favorite lean solution to the cold start problem), then swap in the other participants in that side of the market over time. This can work really well if done correctly. In every two-sided market place there is a favorite child who is more important to the system and needs more attention, like drivers in Uber or homeowners in Airbnb. You should figure this out early on.<p>&gt; just like on Kickstarter.<p>You need to have positioning that supports canned responses &#x2F; dismissals with real incremental value to answer the inevitable comments like: &quot;oh, so like Kickstarter? LOL&quot; or &quot;This sounds exactly like task rabbit&quot;. Ultimately I think you&#x27;ll need to validate whether this incremental value is strong enough to carve out a niche for yourself and win users from the other solutions.<p>&gt;Now, I have an MVP, and most of the features have been implemented, but I have no users.<p>Often times the MVP is a fraction of what you think, and you should spend the other X% of your time on GTM strategy and experimenting. The images on the site show payments support, messaging, scheduling, etc. I&#x27;ll bet you could have prioritized better around a single core need that is unmet, and built the first feature cheaply. In this context, the value is connecting the right people at the right time, and you could deliver this with a cell phone, G-Suite and a great landing page with a form for email&#x2F;phone number collection.<p>My impression is this is a grass roots, neighborly &#x2F; community-driven idea, which is really cool. It has a feel-good, positive slant that pulls on your heart strings, which I think can help with marketing. The next question I&#x27;d ask is: &quot;who is the type of person that would buy this over a Taskrabbit or existing expert solution?&quot;. Who wants to feel good about paying for services in addition to being happy the job got done?<p>I would turn to churches and similar groups, community centers, and leverage your own network to find a key partnership that can give you a pipeline of paying customers who want to feel good about using this type of thing rather than the typical service aggregator. In the future, I&#x27;d think about hiring or partnering with someone to round out your weaknesses, like an extroverted, people-oriented person with a large network who will shamelessly market the thing and isn&#x27;t afraid of rejection, difficult conversations, vulnerability, etc.<p>The site looks great, and congrats on building something and deploying it to the world. That&#x27;s hard and not many have done this, and is something to be proud of. Worst case, you have a great portfolio project to show off (maybe when pitching yourself as a technical cofounder on the next thing?) Now, if you get one paying customer and see that $ hit your bank account, that&#x27;s even harder and you&#x27;re doing what most people only dream and talk about, which is something to be even more proud of. Stay with it!