Hunting Users Pre-MVP
- Notify Me recommends X, Reddit, Indie Hackers, LinkedIn, and niche Slack/Discord communities for finding pre-product users. (x.com) - Practitioners say X gives rapid early feedback while Reddit and niche groups reveal deeper, recurring pain conversations. (x.com) - Social listening and keyword monitoring are suggested to surface buying intent and real complaints before a product exists. (x.com)
Founders trying to find users before they have a product are being told to start where complaints already live: X for speed, Reddit and niche communities for depth. (x.com) A July 2026 post from Notify Me listed five places to look for pre-Minimum Viable Product users: X, Reddit, Indie Hackers, LinkedIn, and niche Slack or Discord groups. The advice was to use those channels before writing much code. (x.com) In a separate July 2026 post, practitioners said X produces fast replies and quick signal on positioning, while Reddit and niche groups surface repeated pain points in longer conversations. Those forums tend to preserve older threads, which makes patterns easier to spot. (x.com) The playbook starts with customer discovery, the process of finding people with a problem before building a solution. Minimum Viable Product means the smallest version of a product that can test whether that problem is real. (ycombinator.com, productplan.com) That pushes founders toward public conversations instead of private brainstorming. Indie Hackers is built around founders sharing launches, revenue, and feedback in public, while LinkedIn search can be narrowed with Boolean operators such as AND, OR, and NOT to find specific job titles and industries. (indiehackers.com, linkedin.com) Slack and Discord matter because many specialist groups moved off the open web into invite-only channels organized by topic. Directories from Hive Index and Startups.com list hundreds of founder and operator communities across both platforms. (thehiveindex.com, startups.com, thehiveindex.com) The monitoring piece is newer than the forum list. Another July 2026 post recommended social listening and keyword tracking to catch people asking for recommendations, naming competitors, or describing a problem in their own words before a product exists. (x.com) That can be done with saved searches and alerts rather than broad audience building. Reddit monitoring tools now pitch founders on tracking keywords across subreddits and sending alerts by email or Slack when those terms appear. (pageradar.io, syften.com) The common thread is less about posting everywhere than about watching a few places closely enough to hear the same complaint twice. For pre-MVP founders, the first users are often visible before the first feature is. (x.com, x.com)
