Can we sell a tiny product on day 1 with almost no followers?

The answer is yes, but this would be a lot harder.

To gain trust of your audience, you can first help them in online forum / slack where they hang out online. You can start by answering question they ask, and take note of the question and "why" they asked this question (eg: why do they ask this on the forum? what are they trying to achieve). Once you have helped enough people, and visibly online in public, you will start gaining trust of them, and you would notice pattern of the common question asked by your audience (which means reoccuring pain), then you can start building a product based on this pain, and you can be confident that this would sell as this actually solve a pain the audience is facing.

A shortcut for finding an audience which you can help quickly, is to choose audience which have the same occupation / profession as you.

If you want to continue doing this, you will need to keep building audience and selling different products to the same audience. The hardest part of point sales is trust. Even if you sell something at 1$, there is a trust deficit when you buy from stranger.

So focus on spreading your ideas, why these small problems matter, keep at them. One day isn't enough to know if problem is relevant sometimes it takes a few years. Focus on finding audience that closely matches your lifestyle and you will likely have many problems that are common with this audience. Then build your tiny solutions.

Finding new users is extremely time consuming. Most companies survive through expansion (solve other problems for same customer)

Riding in the same boat bro!

I tried to build & ship a simple tool [1] in one month(not 1 day btw), which got almost 0 customer engagement - just few comments on how good the idea is.

This made me question myself on solving a bigger problem & I spent around 5 months on a ML based product.Which eventually turned out out of my ML knowledge's reach (couldn't hire one too); so I stopped working on it & put it aside for sometime later.

Right now, like you, I'm working on building an audience on reddit/IH/twitter; so that I can ship my short-sprinted projects.

[1]: https://suppme.netlify.app/

“Tiny” as in small, intricate and expensive or “tiny” as in tiny price? If it is a self-evidently compelling product for a niche or mass US market, the threshold in the US for “tiny price” (as in reflexively whipping out the CC) for a HN sort of community was $500 US, but that was a few years ago. More than $500, and you have to provide supporting arguments for why it is worth it.

You’ve gotta think about the value you’re bringing to your customers. You’ve had 1 sale which is good, that shows it is something at least someone wants. But consider this: if you’re spending 1 day on building something, the barrier to someone else building it is very low.

Since this is HN, I’m assuming this is some sort of software. Building software is complicated and there is a reason most tools out there have lots of engineers working full time on it. You’re not going to retire off of a quick 24 hour build session. Nor even by building hundreds of little one day tools.

This practice could be good to find a market where there is clearly a need, but building a quality product, not a quick one, is where you’ll derive the most success.

Sure, sales and marketing can help you profit off of lower quality apps (not a judgment of your skill, but 24 hours isn’t enough time to build a quality app that has any level of complexity), but it will only get you so far.

They weren't tiny products but I've done this multiple times without an existing audience by posting around on places like reddit and HN, or relying on app store search traffic.

Obviously it would need to be something that people were willing to pay for, and presentation can help a lot.

Sounds like you need to learn about marketing, and just keep learning. Soak up like a sponge everything you can find. Indiehackers is a good community. I'm inspired though and I love the idea of 24h products (how many actual hours do you do in the 24? Do you sleep?).

What type of product?