Should I Code or Market First as a Solo Startup Founder? (Coding Vlog)

so you have a brilliant idea for your startup or maybe you want to create a side project to ear some extra income alongside your full-time job but here's the Dilemma every founder will face do you spend your time building out the core features of your product or should you Market it first to make sure there is demand for what you are building and for every moment you spend debating this someone else is using that time to get ahead if you dive head first into building you risk finding out there is zero demand for your product but if you start with marketing you are essentially making a promise for a product that does not exist so let's break down the smartest and most logical ways to approach both building and marketing as a solo startup founder I'll also walk you through how I grew my startup to over 10,000 users and has generated over $50,000 in Revenue in just a few months and by the end of this video you'll have a clear answer should you focus on building your startup first or is that time better spent marketing and validating your

idea in my opinion there are only a few cases where focusing on building first actually makes sense and they are rare number one if your product is truly unique and has no competitors then getting it out first can establish yourself as the goto solution from there you can set the standard and capture a dedicated user base of early adopters and number two is when you can see clear demand where users are practically begging for a solution whether this be through online forums social media or inperson conversations in this case you need to ship an MVP to satisfy this demand as soon as possible getting early feedback here is essential as it lets you to iterate and shape your product into something that the users cannot live without for my own startup I actually focused on building first and looking back I would say it was the right choice there were no existing tools that could do what mine did and I could see clear Demand on the open AR forums and subreddits I focused on shipping something right away and from there I gained a user base who were eager to give me feedback to improve the product and this was all because they used my tool in the daily workflows and I solved a real problem for them so when you find that rare moment no competition clear demand that's when building first makes all the

difference but in most cases you're better off using the time in the early stages to validate your product it doesn't matter how game-changing you think your startup will be your startup lives in the real world where you need real users paying customers and constant feedback to succeed here are some simple action steps you can take these days creating a landing page that showcases your concept is surprisingly easy it's your first tool for getting feedback gauging interest and more importantly seeing if your target audience even exists I personally Built My landed page with magic UI as I really like the design patterns and the animations that come with their components if you're not a technical person tools like framer and web flow are also great they offer good templates that let you drag and drop elements to create landing pages without having to write any code once you have your landing page it's just a matter of getting it in front of as many people as possible reach out to communities forums social media groups to find your target audience even if it's just 10 people giving you feedback on your product that's still more valuable than 10 weeks of building without any insight one of

the hardest parts of being a solo founder is juggling between two very different mindsets building and marketing each takes a different kind of focus and one thing I've learned is that Contex switching is your biggest enemy when you constantly switch from coding to promoting it's like trying to Sprint and meditate at the same time my tip for this would be to block out your days to do specific tasks I block out certain days just for a few things building features fixing bugs or making improvements those days I am in build mode and on other days it's full-on marketing mode whether that be creating content reaching out to customers and clients or analyzing feedback from users the goal is to minimize the constant back and forth so that I can go deep on one thing at a time as a solo founder sometimes you need to embrace the boring work a trap I see a lot of people fall into is trying to do the SMART work before doing the hard work but here's the truth sometimes the smart work is the hard work for example it's not glamorous to spend hours coding tiny fixes for your app or promoting your product on different platforms just to get zero feedback those small wins all matter though it is building the foundation and Trust for your product if you want more videos on tips and advice for running a solo startup please like And subscribe and I'll see you in the next one bye-bye