The Product Catches Up to the Promise

I’m a stay-at-home dad now, after years as a product manager. I see both sides of this problem.

People post new products in parenting groups all the time. Meal-planning apps show up often. The pitch assumes that we will notice the post, understand the product, click the link, create an account, and hand over money or an email address.

That is a lot to ask from a tired parent who was not looking for another app.

A community post can work after people know what the product does, or when the person sharing it has already earned some trust. It is a weak way to find the first customer because the founder still has basic questions to answer. Which part of the problem matters? What does a useful result look like?

Sometimes you have to find one person in the real world, get their attention, and offer to solve a problem they already have.

The first attempt will probably be rough. Your first customer needs enough patience to live with that. A polished-product pitch sets an expectation you cannot meet. Trust has to come from showing that you understand the outcome they want and will keep working until you can deliver it.

That sounds like a chicken-and-egg problem. How do you earn trust before the product is ready?

The product catches up to the promise later.

I ignore every meal-planning app I see posted in parenting subreddits. I scroll right past them.

Here is an offer that might actually work on me:

Someone stops me in the bus pickup line and says:

I’ll text you three dinner ideas based on what’s actually in your fridge every Sunday for a month. Free.

The whole service is one useful text message. I do not have to create an account or learn an app. It solves the problem I know I will have on Sunday night.

I’d probably say yes on the spot.

Founders worry about spamming people with a sales pitch, and they should. Posting a link to a parenting group gives every reader a job: figure out the product, decide whether it fits, and decide whether to trust the stranger posting it. Most people will keep scrolling.

Offering to solve one person’s problem gives the founder the job. They have to listen, deliver something useful, see whether it helped, and adjust.

Promotion broadcasts a pitch and waits for someone to respond. Customer development gives the founder evidence about both the problem and the proposed solution.

This is how we end up with so much vibe-coded AI spam. Ask an LLM how to get your first user and it will probably tell you to post in relevant subreddits, join online communities, and share your product where your audience hangs out.

That advice is everywhere because it’s easy to document. The internet is full of founders writing posts about posting their products.

The work that gets left out is finding one person with one real problem and offering to solve it manually. It feels awkward, and it does not scale.

Standing in a bus pickup line and helping one exhausted parent figure out dinner makes an unremarkable Reddit post. It can still produce the first customer.

The dashboard, automation, and app matter after the service works. They help deliver the same result to more people with less manual effort. Building them first gives the founder more code to maintain before they know whether the result is useful.

For the first customer, the outcome comes first.

Promise the outcome. Deliver it manually. Pay attention to what works. Then build the product around what you learned.

The product catches up to the promise later.