Artur Kuznetsov

Everyone says to test demand before you build. We didn t. We built the product first, like a lot of people do, and only afterward found a fast way to test the part we d skipped.

What we re testing now isn t really the idea - it s the positioning: Does someone landing on our page understand what the product is? Does the offer make sense? Does the pricing feel right?
We use a paid research panel (Prolific, though there are others like Wynter, PickFu and Lyssna) to put the page in front of people who match our audience. They read it and answer a short questionnaire: What do you think this does? Do you understand it? Does the price seem fair? You pick the audience, they review, you pay per response. A few hours to prepare, results back the same day.

It's been most useful for catching where people misread the offer - something our existing users can t really tell us, because they already understood it well enough to sign up. We ll use this approach for landing page changes from now on, and we ll run these tests before building the next thing rather than after.

How do you test whether people understand your product or your idea before you commit to it?

Hot take: most developer time trackers are basically surveillance software with a productivity logo slapped on top.

Random screenshots. Keyboard activity. Idle timers. Productivity scores.

And somehow we're supposed to believe that's helping developers do better work?

Everyone tells founders to get a mentor, so I tried properly. I used one of the mentor-matching platforms, had one useful call and then the person stopped replying. That was not a one-off. A lot of people there never reply, and of the ones who do, some profiles look fake and others are mainly there to sell you their agency.

Reaching out directly was not much better. Two advisors cancelled the intro call once they heard we are bootstrapped rather than venture funded, because their real service costs tens of thousands, not hundreds. Another sells a course for $10K, advertises large growth, but in reality there is no guarantee.