How to find users if the problem you're working on is widespread?

This is a tough problem that we encountered at TrueCar. People buy a car every 7 years, so a customer today will not be top of mind in 7 years. Before the pandemic we were working on a feature that would keep track of cars you own and suggest maintenance, parts, etc that would maintain resale value.

For your home buying example, maybe there are services that you can offer related to home ownership (e.g. subscription based handyman or gardeners), so that you can be top of mind month after month, not just once a decade when people buy houses. You can then be a great resource when people go to buy a new house as well.

If customers are inconsistent, get buy-in from the people who sell -- if your example is home buying, you would get real estate agents on board. Even if the agents are what you are trying to replace, you still get them on board by letting them sell through your solution instead of their old one. In short, look for who you can collaborate with instead of who you can sell to.

You need to understand problem awareness.

Your users are somewhere along the spectrum of: Unaware <-> Problem Aware <-> Solution Aware <-> Product Aware <-> Most Aware

Where they fall on that spectrum will determine how you interact with them. Try researching "problem awareness" or "customer awareness".

A couple of ideas:

- Figure out how to target the people who are immediately looking for your service or might be. For the home example, people going to open houses, people searching mortgage rates, renters who just had a kid or got married, Employees of a startup that just IPO'd or was acquired.

- Try to get referrals from happy past customers. I've used home buying services and also recruiting services that will just straight up mail me a check for thousands of dollars if I was a customer, and sent them a friends referral.

Maybe it's not worth targeting those users directly, and instead you should target the intermediaries who have the volume (e.g. estate agents for home buying).

we have a business in rental space and decided to go for b2b2c distribution. We're partnering with agents and landlords who are offering our product to tenants.

Home buying, for example, is a big problem so there are probably forums and communities dedicated to it.