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- Idea Of The Day - Build the platform where users help build the product.
Idea Of The Day - Build the platform where users help build the product.
Needs To Exist
May 26, 2025
In partnership with
GM. This is Needs to Exist (aka NTE), bringing you a startup idea to build with your community—not just for them.
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Here’s what we’ve got for you today.
Daily Idea - Build With Them
Comment goals
Built by users, not guesses.
The One Liner
Build with your users, not just for them.
The 140 character tweet (or X) version
Don’t just guess what your customers want, co-create it. This platform lets your community help design, shape, and launch the product with you.
The Longer Story Version
The Problem
95% of products flop. And not because they weren’t built well, but because they weren’t built with the right people.
Founders spend months (or years) perfecting something in a vacuum. Then they ship it... and crickets.
Focus groups? Too slow. Customer interviews? Never scale. Most teams make educated guesses based on outdated assumptions. That’s how you end up with beautiful products nobody asked for.
What if your next product came with customers already waiting, excited and emotionally invested in its success?
The Solution
You flip the script. Instead of building then asking for feedback, you co-build from day one.
Here’s how it works:
Start with a forum, a prompt, or a live brainstorm session.
Let your community upvote ideas, debate features, and test early mocks.
Use AI to surface the best feedback and segment by user type.
Every step becomes a two-way street—people shape the roadmap, and feel ownership of the outcome.
The result? Products with buy-in baked in. You don’t need to sell it to your audience, they already feel like they helped make it.
How We’d Build It
Stage 1: MVP Mode (0–1 builders)
Front-End: Use Softr + Airtable to spin up community forums, feature voting, and form-based feedback loops.
AI Layer: Integrate Tally + GPT-4 to auto-summarize feedback and sentiment.
Distribution: Start with your own audience or an underserved niche (e.g., indie hackers, Web3 tools).
Stage 2: Community-Driven Power-Up
Stage 3: Full SaaS Platform
GTM:
Partner with community-driven brands, creators, or accelerators.
Offer free access for up to 1,000 feedback cycles.
Run “Build With Us” public challenges with rewards for top contributors.
Why It Needs to Exist
Because the next billion-dollar product won’t come from a lone genius, it’ll come from a builder with a crowd behind them.
Co-creation isn’t just a trend, it’s the moat. The feedback is the distribution. Every feature request is a future customer. Every vote is a pre-commitment.
This flips product development from solo sport to multiplayer game.
Most tools help you ship faster.
This one helps you ship smarter and with a fanbase already waiting.
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Turn Comments into Companies
Most people scroll past gold.
You read a Reddit thread, a product hunt comment section, a niche Discord, someone drops a killer idea, killer insight, or pain point…and it disappears into the void.
Meanwhile, some founder’s burning $2M to validate the same thing.
Here’s the cheat code: stop treating comments as noise. Start treating them as raw material.
Comments are user research. Validation. Feature requests. Market gaps. Entire businesses are just waiting for someone to pick them up and run.
Here’s how to do it:
Go where people complain.
Product Hunt. Hacker News. Indie Hackers. Subreddits like r/Entrepreneur, r/SaaS, or niche subs (e.g. r/Fitness if you’re into health).
Look for frustration, janky workarounds, or “why hasn’t someone built X yet?” moments.Pattern match the pain.
See the same thing mentioned more than once? That’s a signal.
No one’s asking for a better espresso machine—they’re complaining about how to clean it.
No one says “I wish I had another newsletter”—they say, “I don’t know who to trust for XYZ info.”Build small, test fast.
Don’t write a business plan. Write a comment back.
“I’m building something for this—want to be the first to try it?”
If 2 people say yes, you’ve got something.
Tools to Turn Comments Into Companies
Twemex: Find high-signal comments & replies from smart people on Twitter. Like reading people’s thought processes in reverse.
GummySearch: AI-powered Reddit mining tool. Plug in a keyword and it finds pain points, underserved communities, and what people are begging for.
Looppanel: Use this to turn raw conversations into actionable insights. Originally for UX, but underrated for founders.
Typefully: Draft replies, short pitches, or “would this help?” hooks that look native, not spammy.
[Beehiiv + Tally.so]: Start collecting emails the second someone bites. Even if the product doesn’t exist yet.
Real-World Example:
In a Discord server for indie SaaS tools, a guy complains:
“I hate having to copy my Gumroad customers into my email list manually every week.”
Someone else replies:
“+1. Same for Stripe.”
That thread became Mailflow—a tool that syncs customer purchases into your email CRM automatically.
Built in 3 weekends. MRR crossed $3K in 6 months.
All from a comment.
The Point?
Startups don’t need to start with an idea.
They can start with a comment.
You don’t need to be a genius. You need to be a good listener.
Read the room. Spot the pain. Build the aspirin.
That’s how you go from comments → cashflow.
What kind of ideas do you want more of? |
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