Let’s Find Product-Market Fit

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I’ll help you validate your product, find the best niche to sell in, and land your first paying customers

You have a brilliant idea and wonderful vision

It starts out well.
You know where you’re going and you know what you’re building.
You build an MVP and start looking for customers (aka marketing).
But you can’t find any.

Why can’t you find customers?

You thought you understood what your customers needed.
Maybe you’re even one of them - if you built it to solve your own problem.
You thought you knew for sure they would love what you have to offer.
But it’s not that easy.
Some say it’s not the right time, others say it’s expensive, a few say it’s a great idea but just not for them.
You’re putting everything you can into marketing, but nothing seems to be working.
With your motivation waning you find yourself at a crossroads.

What is validation?

Validation isn’t about putting up a landing page with a buy button and hoping people will just magically appear.
Validation isn’t about analyzing competition, tracking SEO keywords, or writing content on social media hoping it takes off.
Validation is finding real customers and getting them to pay for your product.
Ideally you should validate before you build too much of it (but we can start wherever you are right now).

Validation in 5 steps

  1. Niche down - Find the right audience to serve with your product.
  1. Adjust positioning - Understand the real tangible benefits your product will bring to your ideal customers.
  1. Select channels - Find the best ways to approach your ideal customers and know how to use them well.
  1. Close sales - Have conversations with potential customers that result in them handing over their credit card details.
  1. Pivot (a bit) - Many ideas don’t work in the market on the first try and require micro-pivots and adjustments based on what you learn while trying to close sales.
Once these 5 steps are locked in, your business starts to grow.
It doesn’t mean the work is over.
But the trajectory changes for good.
And your business changes for good.
 
Understanding validation is what makes repeat founders succeed way more often than first time founders.

My name is Eli Finer

I help solo founders and early stage startups validate their ideas and find product-market fit.
I've been a software developer for 24 years, a life coach for 14, and a full time marketer for the last 4 years.
I can read and write code in a dozen programming languages, understand how people think and feel, and have been up to my eyeballs in marketing for the last 4 years.
This gives me a unique perspective on what it takes to transform an engineer into an entrepreneur.
I have a small YouTube channel at youtube.com/@finereli, a lively Twitter account at twitter.com/finereli, and a long-form newsletter at finereli.substack.com.
There are also free videos and guides on this site that you can check out.
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Here’s what my clients are saying

 
Roni Dover, CTO at Digma We were going to base our company on helping developers get rid of performance problems in their code.Turns out developers don't care about performance. It would not have been successful. Eli was able to pull some of the users and get answers that didn't align with our belief system and this was a really big contribution
 
 
 
Nir Shafrir, CEO at Digma Eli represents the combination of developer perspective and marketing perspective. This amazing combination of developer experience and being able to purify the way they think, the way they speak, what makes sense to them and what doesn't make Eli very unique.
 
 
 
Artyom Smironff, Entrepreneur I always wanted to build something on the side so that I could drop my job and be the master of my own time. I'm much more confident now. I was in a fog and now it's all clear. It's so clear that I don't understand how I didn't know it before because now it's so obvious to me.
 
 
 
Luke Frauhiger, Entrepreneur Without Eli I would have been just pumping time into the project, trying to get to the point where I had enough traction and I would have went for a long ways until I was just absolutely frustrated and burnt out.
 

Hire me

I used to offer complex packages, monthly plans, a big deals but realized it doesn’t work for the dynamic startup world (or for my personal need for freedom).
Sometimes you need to work with me 3 times in the same week, and sometimes you’re good by yourself for a few months.

One simple price

$300 per session (60 minutes)
We can do a one-off call and never see each other again, or meet every week for a while, or vary the cadence to your needs.
In between our calls we’ll keep in touch via text (usually Discord DMs) as often as necessary so I’m aware of the changing circumstances and we don’t need long updates at the start of each call.
Before you pay me anything I’d like to meet you for a free consultation call, see how I can help and make sure we’re a good match for each other.

Contact me

DM me on Twitter
Send me an email
Book a call with me