When starting out a new side project or idea, do you plan, map, and validate user personas?
A lot of us when we start out with a new idea, it's because we have faced it ourself, and hence want to do something about it. But do you folks spend some time on thinking who exactly is the user for this going to be? What is the workflow while going from idea to first line of code?
I don't really trust personas before I've seen the pain in the wild.
A persona doc can make the idea feel clearer than it actually is. What I’d rather do first is start from the pain I think exists, then find a few real people already describing that pain in their own words.
Once you read how they talk about it, what they tried, and where they get stuck, the persona becomes much less imaginary.
So for me the order would be: notice the pain, find real language around it, then map the persona. Not the other way around.
Fair enough, but how do you zone in on who to talk to? There is a lot of pain you see on subreddits and discords but a bunch of it is just noise. How do you know if talking to this "type" of people will help me validate that pain?
Yeah, that's the hard part. I wouldn't use volume of complaints as the first filter, because loud communities can make weak pain look bigger than it is.
I'd look for behavior change.
If someone only says “this is annoying,” that's weak. If they say “I’m using a spreadsheet for this,” “I tried X but it broke,” “we pay someone to handle this manually,” or “I keep losing time on this every week,” that's a much better person to talk to.
Those people have already moved because of the pain. Their workaround tells you the problem is real enough to create action.
Then I’d look for a few more people with the same role, workflow, or context. If they describe the problem in similar words without you leading them, the persona starts to become real.
So I wouldn't start with the persona. I’d start with the people who already changed their behavior because the pain was annoying enough.
Yes always. For Ahead, a financial planning tool for new parents, I spent a month on Reddit genuinely participating in parenting and personal finance communities before I ever mentioned what I was building. That gave me a clear picture of who the user was, what language they used, and what they actually feared financially when a baby arrived. The validation came from watching 120K people engage with content about the exact problem I was solving. Personas without that community immersion would have been guesswork.