Demand board · computed September 28
What r/ycombinator keeps asking for
Recurring demands mined from the community's top posts this week, with the threads as receipts. Not invented: if it's listed, people are actually asking.
How do I get my first customers or users with little to no budget?
People repeatedly ask for playbooks and tactics to launch and acquire early users/customers when they have no marketing budget (zero-budget launch, first paid pilot, first users on mobile apps).
How can I validate demand before building (pretend product / smoke tests)?
Many posts ask for ways to test customer interest or ‘pretend’ a product exists (landing pages, smoke tests, pre-sales) so they don’t waste months building something nobody wants.
Practical help for first-time or non‑technical founders and people transitioning from jobs
Users want concrete help for being non-technical or switching from corporate life to founding — hiring/cofounder strategies, operational gaps, and how to keep momentum while employed.
How do you decide when to abandon a project vs. keep iterating?
There’s recurring interest in frameworks and signals for when to kill a project, iterate, or pivot after shipping and seeing poor or mixed results.
Get the board when it changes
Thinking of engaging here? Check r/ycombinator's self-promotion rules first, and the wider method in the Reddit playbook. Thread Otter runs this same mining continuously on YOUR buyers' communities, with replies drafted when someone asks for what you build: start free.