In order answer this question, first, you need to understand the purpose and the motivation of this blog.

The primary purpose of this blog is to share my thoughts and knowledge in public for

• To help others who might be in the same path as mine and learn from my mistakes

• A personal journal as a flashback machine for my future self.

In order to achieve the above goals, the platform of choice should meet certain criteria -

• I shouldn't be influenced by the public = no likes, no feedback, no newsfeeds (twitter), no way for public to give me feedback this is intentional

• I should have the freedom to write my true intentions and thoughts - that can only come with zero platform control. (no medium or substack)

• It should just focus on the writing - hence simple markdown formatting and quick update using my own CMS and hosting; with a touch for inspired design from hey blog.

If you want to know on how I built this blog, tech stack and design philosophy, do send me a DM on twitter.

User research should be the first step in creating any new product. I've made this mistake before by not collecting enough user information and ended up solving for no one.

Fortunately, this has been highly focus lately on twitter with focus on audience building, which has a second order effect of solving the right user problem.

Build audience has multiple uses -

1. solving the correct user problem

2. targeting the right user persona

3. building the initial distribution channels for finding early adopters for your product

How did I conduct my user research ?

My main channel for finding users is reddit. Reddit turned out to the best avenue for researching any serious problems because -

1. people on reddit are quite serious

2. they use the platform for sharing about their problem or finding a solution - which is the best combination for finding a potential interviewees

3. you already have tons for problems from the previous posts in reddit - you would get the problem after spending couple of weeks just by reading the existing posts

Strategy

I joined as many subreddits as possible related to the emotions, mental health, and emotional wellbeing.

I went for r/behaviouralanalysis, r/emotionalintelligence, r/depression, r/anxiety, r/therapy, r/CBT. In addition, I joined, r/startups, r/entrepreneurship, r/webdev, r/reactjs since I can post and ask question about my app.

I've done two things for talking to users from these subreddits -

Method 1 - Making posts

Created posts about my startup and the development of the startup, while at the same time asking questions as post to find the current problems users are facing.

Fails:

• The post which are promotional were a complete flop show, people hated them.

• The posts on question for help had almost no response, e.g: How do you search for your therapists?

Success:

Posts which is worked the best are the controversial ideas / questions, people had the motivation to respond when you challenge their beliefs.

Then you can further go down the rabbit hole by asking more question as part of your argument. This was a goldmine. The best part is users think they're winning and also helping you at same time, by correcting mistakes in my thought process.

Method 2 - Cold Messaging

The good old cold calling. I came down to the basics for interacting with people when I ran out of posts and needed to understand the user in depth for demographic data, age, location, profession.

I directly messaged people who commented on my posts. People are 100% in to help you, sometimes they themselves offer to answer your questions.

I also, just went down the old posts and pinged people who has questions or are actively participating in sub.

Success:

This was the best method so far for getting very deep personal information

Fail:

The response rate is so low in this case because people didn't had any context. 1 in 10 people accepted the request for helping.