"You need to post daily to grow on social media."
This is probably the biggest lie in content marketing.
Here's what actually builds an audience (and why I stopped posting daily): ๐งต
Day 2 of fixing user activation for an early-stage startup.
After getting the context of the product from the client's POV, it was time to go into the market and find out what our audience is complaining about.
Now, ordinarily, this would take at least 2-3 days and over 20 hours of solid work digging through forums, social media posts, and so on.
Instead, I just wrote a detailed, deep research prompt and fed it into ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini. I ran this for both individual users and business users, so 6 reports in total.
Each report included at least 20-30 direct quotes from user comments, user reviews, and other sources.
My favourite part was adding specific instructions to look for evidence that disproves what we are researching. That was how I was able to remove confirmation bias.
And bro, the results were CRAZY!
I found that collecting reviews is a huge problem. Apparently, review requests have an industry average of 5% completion rate.
And the worst part was that many freelancers complained that clients often just say "write it for me," and that's it. (P.S This will become very, very important later.
Another problem is that, for most freelancers, their reviews are scattered across so many platforms. Screenshots, LinkedIn recommendations, your website.....it's a whole mess.
Another interesting insight was the state of the competition. One of them was called out for charging $1,500 per month and sending you bot traffic in an attempt to justify the price. Another tool was called an "extortion racket"....interesting.
That made me think of how we can frame this product. Not just as a way to get a review, but as a way to become trusted.
If you want to see the prompt that I used for this research, RT and comment "Research," and I'll send it over to you.
It does a good job of capturing how I think when diagnosing the market for a new product
See you tomorrow for Day 3.
quit satisfying your audience and go stalk reddit for 30 minutes
i'm serious
right now there are people on reddit begging for products that don't exist yet. not vague "i want to make money" garbage. hyper-specific complaints with hundreds of upvotes proving demand
real examples i screenshotted this week:
"why is there no simple template for tracking freelance client payments without using expensive software" - 743 upvotes
"someone please make a checklist for launching a store that isn't a 90 step nightmare" - 519 upvotes
"i'd pay for a swipe file of outreach DMs that don't sound like a robot wrote them" - 381 upvotes
each one of those is a $44 product that doesn't exist yet
the person who builds it first wins automatically. no competition. no audience needed. the demand is already sitting there screaming
i found one of these threads 4 months ago. built the ugliest google doc you've ever seen in one afternoon. no design. no branding. no sales page
still hits my stripe every single day and i haven't opened the file since
reddit users are brutally honest because they're anonymous. they don't perform for likes. they just vent about real problems with uncomfortable detail
twitter is where people flex. reddit is where people confess
confessions with 500 upvotes are product ideas with price tags already attached
i broke down the exact process. which subreddits to target. the search phrases that surface gold. how to validate in 15 minutes. how to get your first 20 buyers without a single follower
RT and comment 'PRODUCTS' - i'll send everything (must be following)