Have you ever built a product? And have you found yourself unable to get your idea on track? This is a case study demonstrating how we discovered a niche audience in a crowded market in under a month, simply by talking to people.

The idea

We wanted to build a unique product for stock market traders. In case you're not familiar, these are the people who work in front of dozens of computer monitors, watching numbers and pushing up oil prices.

So our question was: what might be a good product for these people? What would they pay for? To answer these questions we needed to identify their main challenges. What are those pain points in their lives that we can solve in order to earn their gratitude?

We sat at our tables in the UX studio office and reflected on these questions. In the end we realized that the answers were surprisingly obvious.

The process

Instead of thinking about traders' pain points for hours, I logged into my Facebook account and searched for groups like ﻿"stock market traders"﻿. I started to publish some ads in those groups - for example:

“Hey, We are developing a new product for Traders but we don’t know if we are crazy. I am very curious about your opinion. Can I reach out to you?”

And I also created some eye-catching pictures to help the ads get noticed.