How to get users before you build the product (The Side Door Strategy)

There is a very common startup ritual. You have an idea, so you disappear. Maybe for three months. Maybe six. You get a designer, bring in a developer, argue about features, change the name twice, redesign the landing page because the first shade of blue didn't “feel premium,” and eventually, you launch. Before disappearing, of course, you update your LinkedIn headline to “Building in Stealth.” Because apparently, the idea is so revolutionary that the world cannot be allowed to know you're working on it. So you go quiet, build quietly, tell nobody anything, collect zero user feedback and build no audience—or convince yourself you're “building with user feedback” when, in reality, the users don't actually exist yet.

Then launch day comes, and reality joins the meeting. You have a product, a nice website, maybe even a launch video. Your friends repost it. Your mother has probably shared it in three WhatsApp groups. Then comes the uncomfortable question: where exactly are the users? That's when the panic starts. Ads. Cold emails. Discounts. Influencers. “Join our waitlist.” But what if you didn't have to wait until the product was ready before you started finding users? What if you entered the market through something else first? That's the idea behind the Side Door Strategy.

1. Stop hiding behind the product.

For a lot of early-stage startups, “stealth” is just a nicer way of saying, we haven't spoken to enough people yet. Yes, some things genuinely need to stay confidential. But most entrepreneurs are not secretly developing nuclear technology. You're probably building something around a problem people already experience, which means you can start talking about the problem before the product is ready. You don't need to reveal your entire roadmap. Just show up where your future users already are.

If you're building for entrepreneurs, talk about the things entrepreneurs struggle with. If you're building in healthcare, simplify healthcare conversations. If you're building for retailers, get into the things retailers complain about every day. The product doesn't have to be ready for you to become useful. And while you're doing that, you're learning how people describe the problem, what frustrates them and the strange workarounds they've created. By the time you launch, you're not introducing yourself and trying to acquire users at the same time.

2. Domain expertise is already a side door.

One of the easiest ways into a market is through what you already know. If you've spent years around an industry, you've probably seen things outsiders won't see on a Google search or inside a market research report. You know the annoying parts, the repeated questions and the things people have simply accepted as “that's just how it works.” That knowledge can become content, conversations, resources, a community or even a service before it ever becomes a software feature.

And this is where domain expertise does more than help you build a better product. It helps you get close to the people you're building for. Their questions become research. Their complaints become clues. Their ridiculous spreadsheets and manual workarounds become potential product ideas. You're not standing outside the market, guessing your way in. You're already somewhere inside it, which makes both product development and distribution a little less like throwing darts in the dark.

More insight: How six months of building nothing changed how I build everything.

3. Content creators have been using this strategy for years.

Content creators figured out something startups are still learning: attention is easier to use when you build it before you desperately need it. You don't have to become an influencer or start dancing on TikTok. But if you consistently talk about a problem people already care about, people begin to associate you with that problem. By the time you have something to offer, you're not starting from, “Hello, we exist.”

Look at Aproko Doctor. He built familiarity by making healthcare information easier for everyday people to understand. That matters because healthcare is not an industry where people randomly download an app and immediately hand over trust. Content can become the bridge. The same principle applies to Awadoc and other businesses in trust-heavy industries. You educate, simplify and become useful around the problem first. Then the product has somewhere warmer to land.

4. Build from what you learn.

The Side Door Strategy isn't an excuse to spend two years “building an audience” without building anything else. You don't need 500,000 followers, a ring light or a podcast where you interview the same startup founders everybody else has already interviewed. You need access to the right people. A thousand people who genuinely experience the problem can be more valuable than 100,000 people who just like your jokes.

When you're consistently around potential users, patterns start showing up. The same questions come back. The same complaints keep appearing. People create strange workarounds because existing options aren't good enough. You still need judgment—you can't build every feature someone asks for unless you want your roadmap to look like a supermarket shopping list. But repeated behaviour is hard to ignore. That's the advantage of the side door: instead of build → launch → find users, you enter the market → become useful → learn → build. And when the product is finally ready, you shouldn't be asking where the users are. You should already know.

Start your business