Latest Try 3

On r/SaaS (1,711 upvotes, 313 comments), u/drewautomates shared an analysis of 19 Starter Story founder interviews (all at $10K-$200K+ MRR). The extracted #1 pattern: “Distribution beats product every time. Not a single founder credited product quality as their primary growth driver. Every one pointed to distribution first.” Channel breakdown: Reddit and SEO were the most common (37% of founders). The implication for the novel-mechanic case: when category-search-volume is zero, the SEO half of that mix is unavailable, so the Reddit / community half has to carry the entire load — which means consistent community presence before launch is non-negotiable, not optional.

Latest Try 3

Reusing a pattern from a separate HN validation thread (commenter mchasse, from the CommitBet QT): “go out and find some group of people/companies and then ask them what problems are they currently facing that are not currently ideally solved.” Operationalized as a diagnostic: find 5 candidates in different B2B sub-segments (event marketers, retail print campaigns, B2B sales prospecting). Ask each — before mentioning your product — “how do you currently track QR campaigns and what’s broken about it?” If 4 of 5 sub-segments describe Bitly + spreadsheet + manual reconciliation as broken → marketing problem (real niche, you’re failing to reach it). If 0-1 of 5 describe any current behavior around QR campaign tracking → niche is genuinely too narrow OR the painful version is even narrower than current targeting.

Latest Try 3

From WeekHack’s How to Create a Waiting List Page and Indie Hackers’ How I got my first waitlist request before even launching a landing page threads: Key lessons include talking about work early, always being ready to catch interest, and starting with people rather than features. A simple, ugly page with an email capture form will tell you more about market demand than a thousand lines of perfect code. Pattern: prediction-market analytics is a niche audience — Twitter/Reddit broadcast won’t reach them efficiently. The faster path is to manually find 20 active Kalshi/Polymarket traders (Discord servers, comments under prediction-market posts, Twitter advanced search for I bet on Kalshi) and DM them with a single sentence: Would a tool that explains why X market moved be useful to you? I’m building one if so. If 15 of 20 say no, the problem is narrow; if 15 say yes, you have your real distribution channel. Twitter and Reddit gave you zero because they’re broadcast — your audience requires search-and-DM.