Comment by chatmasta

Nice work, clean demo. Who is your target buyer?

This seems like it could be useful for product discovery (“what are these people complaining about?”), content marketing (“how will my twitter followers react to this blog post?”), and other… reactionary… activities. But what about GTM and lead-gen? Can you ask it “who has job title of CISO, within two degrees of connection to me, working at a company with at least 500 employees that is SOC2 certified?”

I think you need to focus on a target buyer and make sure you nail their use case, or you risk wasting time on a really cool product that kinda/sorta does everything.

What’s your differentiator? Are you in the business of data gathering and curation? Or do you enhance some existing targeting data with “talk to my audience?” These are two distinct product development paths… either you invest in sophisticated data scraping, or you focus on “bring your own audience.” Most companies already have this sort of data on their customers and prospects – how can you meet them where they are?

The other problem is garbage in, garbage out. This product is only as useful as the data you can gather (or that your customer brings to you). A list of emails and names isn’t much on its own. You need the data generated by those people. Maybe you need to partner with data brokers to enrich audience data with social media profiles. Or maybe you leave it up to your customer – let them upload all their support tickets (ZenDesk) and sales calls (Gong) to your software so that they can “talk to their customers.” (Hint: maybe you should partner with Gong, and similar companies who already have this data, to provide this feature to their customers. White-labeling this product might be your fastest path to market.)

But more existentially… is “opinions” the most important aspect of your customer that you want to simulate? And if so… why do you need a _network_ of customers for this? It seems like two disconnected ideas. An “audience” might be a group of people that you only know to be associated because of their shared subscription to your product. Or they all follow someone on Twitter. Or they’ve all written an HN comment with “trivial” in its text. Does the _network_ aspect actually matter, at all?

And if the network aspect is important… why? Is it because you want to discover a new audience? In that case, are you focusing on the right value by simulating the current audience? Or should you be focused more on features for expanding/enriching/discovering “similar” profiles?

I think you’ve got the basis of something really cool here, but you need to figure out your identity and core competency, or you risk doing a bunch of marginally useful stuff kinda well.

Did you see the recent HN launch of Sumble? I see some overlap and similarities between your products, and I’d suggest reaching out to them in case you can work together…

edit: Just saw you went to Cambridge… I live here, if you’re ever around and want to grab coffee. I’m “Miles Richardson” on LinkedIn (and uh… in life). Feel free to message me… I spent five years on a startup that never hit product/market fit, so I’m always happy to point out the hazards…