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Ask HN: How do you test if a market exists for your product?

12 points by jamesroseman ↗ HN
A friend from college and I have been talking about starting a project, but are unsure if we're overly optimistic with how it would fit in the market today. I imagine there must be a better way than cold-call e-mails to network contacts and blind surveys in small pools to figure out the potential of our product.

What tools have you found useful to find product viability in the market? What techniques have worked and not worked for you personally?

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The idea:

We'd like to host programming challenge events in tech companies to help foster feelings of ownership and creator culture. The events would be centered around writing AI against relatively simple games. Competitors would work on their AIs for a week before competing against one another. We'd organize and arrange logistics for the event as well as write the SDKs, games, and infrastructure.

A way to get the ball rolling would be to host events at colleges for free to iterate on the process and see what goes well. This will help us refine the core product as well as see what goes wrong -- but it doesn't help us discover the want for such a product before building it.

7 comments

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technobabble
A quick and easy way is to create a landing page for your events. Create an email account, track amount of times the page has been visited, and see what/if people respond.
z3t4
start locally. spam flyers at the local companies. have a first round. dont expect much engagement. go from there and keep improving. when you have a good working concept you can go state or national and do it professionally.
davidg11
Talk to some university students or programmers at local tech companies and see if they'd be open to participating if their organization sponsored the event but it was not compulsory. Try to get honest feedback on what things would draw them in, i.e. awards, recognition etc.
subsidd
If I were you, I'd -

1. Check if people are doing it already, if yes then how well and how you can differentiate/ carve out a niche. 2. Cold email startups, small organisations. 3. Meet college authorities 4. Call anyone and everyone you think can be a prospective beneficiary.

JSeymourATL
> there must be a better way than cold-call e-mails to network contacts and blind surveys...

If you have any interpersonal savvy and good relating skills, try Old School networking. Get out of your bubble, go meet people.

Two events coming up in Boston are likely target rich opportunities;

MITCIO > http://www.mitcio.com/

CIO Summit Boston > http://www.ciobostonsummit.com/