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I get a lot of emails like this:

Hi! I built an app. Can you take a look at it, give me your feedback, and then help get the word out to your readers?

No. I wish I could, but no.

But this happens so often that I wanna write a blog post explaining the position I’m in.

I only have so many hours in the day. I’m usually booked 3-4 weeks in advance. I set strict work/life balance guardrails on my time, so any work I add to my calendar either has to displace paid client work, or free community work like scripts & blog posts & videos, or my personal life. I just can’t displace any of that for free private work.

I do absolutely consult for software vendors. I used to work for Quest Software, and I’ve consulted for Amazon, Google, and a lot of third party software vendors. It’s real work that requires real effort on my part, and I need to get paid for that.

Having said that, I still wanna help you for free, so I’ve put together this blog post with my favorite advice for software makers. There’s a lot of hard-learned lessons in here, and I hope you can just read ’em and avoid some of the most common pitfalls that folks run into.

First, read The Mom Test.

The book The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick teaches you what questions to ask about your app idea, and who to ask. It sounds simple, but it’s not. Instead of approaching people with your solution, what you wanna do is ask them about the problem that your app solves. You also absolutely do not want to give them answers, nor do you want to lead them, nor argue with them. You want to ask questions that prompt them to tell you what they do, without skewing their answers.

For example, let’s say you’re building a SQL Server monitoring tool. Instead of mentioning anything about a monitoring tool, the first questions you might ask:

• “When was the last time you thought your SQL Server was having a performance problem?”
• “What steps did you take to investigate it?”
• “How long did that take?”
• “Did it get you across the finish line?”
• “Are you satisfied with that? Are your users and manager satisfied with that?”

This helps you understand your real competition. Your toughest competition is complacency. Your target audience are already used to solving the problem, so any new solution is going to require them to research the options, evaluate them, implement one of the solutions, learn to use it, and to remember to use the new way when the problem strikes. Those are huge, huge barriers to adoption.

If they’re satisfied with their current solutions, stop. Give up. Look for another problem to solve. (I know you’re not convinced yet, so keep reading to see the rest of the hurdles you’re going to need to jump.) It’s not that you can’t build something better – it’s that your marketing costs will be unbelievably high. If your target market is already happy with what they have, they’re not going to switch to your product without yours being spectacularly better, cheaper, and simpler.

But if they’re DISsatisfied, congratulations! You’ve found a potential market! Keep going and ask the next question.

Next, ask where they’d look for alternatives.

In our monitoring system example, you’d ask, “It sounds like your manager is dissatisfied with the high costs of your SQL Server performance problems, so…”

• “Have you looked for alternatives?”
• “Where did you look?”
• “What alternatives did you find?”
• “What stopped you from switching to one of them?”

These questions help you understand what your target customers are looking for, the marketing routes you’ll need to take to get your product out there, and the common objections as to why your potential customers aren’t using your competitors.

In our performance monitoring example, let’s say our target user says they Googled for stuff. After you’re done asking them questions, you want to thank them, then go off and repeat the same steps they did. For example, say they Googled – then you should fire up a fresh VM from a cloud provider, not signed in with your accounts, so it doesn’t skew your results, not using any ad blockers, and do the same kinds of searches they did, so you can see what you’re up against:

Look at the first page of results, above the fold. This is your second layer of competition (after complacency), and it includes the AI summary at the top, and the sponsored results. These are all things your users are going to consider.

Make a spreadsheet of the various options, with the competitors going down the left side and the competitive attributes across the top. The competitive attributes aren’t the things you’re proud of: they’re the things your target user said they were dissatisfied with. For example, if the target user said they were having problems with the monitoring tool being too slow, too expensive, and not compatible with Mac desktops, those are the things you’d put across the top, and gauge each of your competitors to see whether they would solve your target user’s problems.

Sometimes you’re going to find that the competition actually already solves the target user’s problems.

Because sometimes, the target users are lying to you.

They’re telling you that they looked for alternatives, but they didn’t. They’ll tell you they tried the alternatives, but they didn’t. They’ll tell you the alternatives had a specific problem, but it was years ago, and the alternatives have long since solved that problem. Your target users just haven’t found out because – again, complacency.

I know, because I see it all the time with my own clients. (That includes you, dear reader.) Folks gripe about a problem – monitoring, source control, database management tooling, you name it – but when I ask the shallowest questions about what work they’ve done to replace those options, the answers become vague and evasive – because the problem isn’t bad enough that it bubbles up to the top of their task list.

The Lean Startup explains who to ask.

In a perfect world, you’d ask perfect strangers, but getting contact info for perfect strangers is pretty hard.

The book The Lean Startup covers how to do it, and I’m gonna try to summarize it as best I can. Build a short 1-page landing page describing the pain you think your target market is facing, and say that you’re working on a new way to solve it. People can put in their email address to get notified when the beta version is available.

Then, buy Google, Facebook, and Instagram ads for the kinds of keywords you think your target market will be searching for. Say you’re building a SQL Server monitoring tool – you don’t actually have to buy keyword ads for that, because that’s expensive. Instead, you can buy keyword ads for related topics with less competition, or have Facebook build you a target audience for the kinds of people who visit a particular web site.

You can – and should – do this even before you’ve got a product built. (That’s why it’s called “lean” – you don’t have to spend much.) This way, as contact emails come in, you can use the questions you built from The Mom Test to talk to them about their pain, and where they’ve been looking for relief. This helps you validate your product idea long before you invest in it.

At that point, you’ll understand the pain, market, and your solution.

You’ll understand more about the pain you’re trying to solve, how your target users are relieving that pain today, and how your proposed pain relief will need to look in order to get any market traction. Ideally, you do these questions first, before you build something, so that you save valuable time. I’m not saying you’ll save time by not building altogether – I’m saying you’ll build something that solves the real pain users are facing, not the pain you think they have, and not the pain your competition thinks the users have.

Ideally, you build something that solves it in a clear simple way.

Non-ideally, you’re reading this after you’ve already built something – but at least now you understand how you need to modify your app, pricing, and marketing material in order to be the #1 competitor in your target market.

Next, build your minimum marketing materials.

At minimum, you need a single web page (which can be the readme.md in your app’s Github repo, if you’re open source) that explains:

• The pain the user is facing
• A clear, 30-60 second video demoing your solution relieving that pain (can also be an animated gif)
• A 2-3 paragraph explanation of how your solution relieves that pain
• Pricing (or if it’s open source, the license)
• A download link, plus a link to minimum requirements and installation instructions, with a video showing the fastest, simplest installation method
• A few 1-5 minute videos showing common use cases, and 2-3 paragraph text explanations with screenshots of those use cases, covering folks who wanna read or folks who wanna watch/listen
• A link for where to get support or file issues
• A signup form to join your email list for announcements

You want the reader to go from top to bottom to get their objections out of the way, in order, so that they’re gradually more and more sold on your product. Think back to the target users that you interviewed, what they were searching for, and why they didn’t choose one of the existing alternatives. Your page needs to make it clear that your solution doesn’t have those problems that prevented ’em from using one of the alternatives.

I’m going to use Erik Darling’s SQL Server Performance Monitor page as an example:

That one first line addresses his target market’s most common concern: performance monitoring tools are expensive.

Then, go back to the target users that you interviewed and tell them, “Hey, while I was doing research, I stumbled across this page. Can you take a look at it?” Have them go through the page, and just listen to their reactions. Ideally, when you’re just getting started, you don’t want your name on the page: you just want their raw reactions as to whether or not they’re interested. If they jump up and point at the screen, saying they gotta have this thing, then you’ve done a good job.

Then the real work starts.

I know, I can hear you from here, yelling, “OMG, Brent, I thought the rest of this was work!” Nah, that’s just table stakes.

Remember back when our target users said they looked for alternatives, and where they looked? You need your solution to show up there. Some of those locations are going to be genuinely hard, like getting on to the first page of Google search results. You may have to resort to expensive ads on Google, Facebook, Instagram, etc, and those also really need expensive consultants to get the job done correctly.

You probably wanna start with the cheapest, least-popular places where your target users looked. For example, maybe they looked in Reddit or a particular forum. You wanna be active there, showing people how to solve their pain points with your solution, without being spammy.

You can’t just announce the product once and expect the users to come rolling in, either. You have to keep talking about the pain, your relief, and how it works. Again, I’m going to use Erik as an example. If you go to his blog or his YouTube channel, odds are that at least one post in the last week or two is about his free Performance Monitor. He has to keep demonstrating it in different ways, showing its value, showing how easy it is, because people never hear you the first time.

That work never ends. Ever.

I announced sp_Blitz, my free SQL Server health check stored procedure, way back in 2011, and I still have to blog about it and the rest of the First Responder Kit stored procedures all the time. New users keep coming into our community, experiencing the same database pains, and I have to keep showing them how to get relief. All this, even though my solution is free!

I can’t do all this for everybody.

I truly wish I could. I get so many emails from people with really cool ideas. Heck, the thing that motivated me to write this post was that I got an email from somebody who’d built an open source tool on Github that sounded like something I’d personally love to use – but the Github readme included a 2-page wall of text about the product, no screenshots, no license, no list of versions or platforms supported, etc. I felt like I was part of the target user market – but I would have to do so much work on my own part to even figure out if the thing could work for me, and … I just don’t have time for that.

In the age of AI, where anybody can haphazardly describe something and a robotic assistant will slap something together that looks vaguely professional, building an app is the easy part. It’s too hard for consumers to sift through the noise to find the good stuff.

However, we’re also in the golden age of open source, where it’s never been easier to manage a public open source project. We now have all kinds of AI tools to help us vet code contributions from strangers, quickly with low effort.

So if you’re thinking about building something to relieve a pain you’re experiencing, and you don’t wanna do everything described in this article, I’d highly encourage you to look at the open source tools you already use on a day-to-day basis. Could those tools be modified to more helpfully address the pain point you’re experiencing? Are the project maintainers open to code contributions from you that aim to relieve that pain? Consider starting there instead of building an all-new tool. You’ll get the satisfaction of helping people get their pains relieved – without the pain that comes with trying to get a new product adopted by the market.

I know, it’s sexier to be the person who runs/owns The Product™, and it’s tempting to think you could be the next SaaS gazillionaire from your Incredible Idea™, but the reality is a lot harder than that, and it’s a grind. It’s absolutely doable, and you CAN do it – but it’s unrealistic to expect other people to do that grind for you.

The least I can do is give you a roadmap for that grind. If you do that grind, and you build the minimum page described above, THEN email me a link to it! That way, I can take 5 minutes to read through it, scan a couple of the videos, and give you my feedback for free. Good luck, happy grinding, and I’m excited to see what you build!

I asked y’all to make the comments on this post look like my ChatGPT history, and y’all understood the assignment. The answers were all over the place from accurate to humorous. Here are the 5 runners-up first, each of whom won a Fundamentals Bundle for themselves or someone they love, since many of these folks already had a Fundamentals membership:

“What is the closest distance to walk by a pool without any chances of falling in?” – Kelley Pribil – This calls back to this 2023 incident caught on my home security cameras. I laughed out loud when I read this because I still think about this incident every time I walk around that area of the pool. “Gotta be careful, don’t wanna take a swim right now…”

“Write a short article about a Contest that is called ‘Make the Comments Look Like My ChatGPT History'” – Cavaliery – Back in 2023, I bought a WordPress plugin that would write articles for you, plus content review, tweaking, etc. I experimented with it for a while, bought a separate domain with no names on it, had it author a bunch of Azure posts automatically, and watched the web page analytics to see if it would catch on. I ended up shutting it down – it was too early for the tools to write good stuff – but these days I wouldn’t be surprised if it was a lot more successful.

“Can I route the OBDII car performance metrics to the local SQL Server instance?” – Andrew Buis – Around 2003, I built a car computer for my gooorgeous Volvo C70. It was long before automotive cellular connections were an affordable thing, so I had it watching for open WiFi networks, and when it found one, it would automatically download my mail and read it to me, among other things. This question is exactly the kind of thing 2003 Brent would have asked ChatGPT.

“Write a gentle rejection email to someone who submitted a pull request to First Responder Kit that technically works but that I will never, ever merge.” – Rebecca – This is a great idea and I will actually do it, hahaha.

“What problem are you trying to solve” – Zweitze – There were several takes on this joke, but I like Zweitze’s best because it turns things around on ChatGPT instead of my readers. I can just imagine looking at some garbage coming out of ChatGPT, getting exasperated, and yelling, “Yo, what problem are you trying to solve with this?!?” (I have to confess that I’ve yelled some pretty strong stuff at GIthub Copilot during code reviews when it gets distracted.)

And the winners…

Who each pick up a Fundamentals & Mastering Bundle for themselves or to re-gift to a passing stranger:

“1. What are the top 10 tropical vacation hotspots? 2. What gin and tonic drinks are rated in the top 5 best? 3. How many licks does it take to get to the center of a tootsie roll pop?” – Jersey – I have actually prompted ChatGPT with the contents of my bar and fridge, told it that I prefer very easy-to-mix drinks, and that’s how I started drinking Boulevardiers. Really rough hangovers though, so I quit that.

“Explain the ending of “Lost” like I am 5 years old. Is the plural of “index” “indexes” or “indices”? Also, how do I spell “mantenance”?” – Scott – I adooooored Lost, and I never thought about the plural of index, and maintenance is one of those words that took me years to turn into muscle memory.

I’m going to separate this last one by Alex into its own section because it’s long:

A long one by Alex

Please give specific, actionable advice for the following business problem. Do not give advice that recommends changing my brand, creating vast amounts of new content, or undermining my client’s integrity. Provide a complete answer in a friendly, business minded tone.

I’m looking for some advice on how to bring in more clients for my SQL Server consulting and training business.

I have a couple of avenues I can use to reach an audience:
1. I run a community blog that posts most working days, with ~150,000 unique weekly visitors. Engagement is driven by my email newsletter, which is sent out after each post, has an open rate of 30%, and contains a copy of the most recent post.
2. I run a weekly YouTube Q/A roundup that gets around ~2K views over the first week. Each video covers between 8-15 questions from my community submitted via a poll.
3. I build and maintain a set of free maintenance SQL Server scripts that are widely used in and outside of my community.
4. I run a query plan tuning website that sees ~75k unique weekly visitors.
5. I host in-person training sessions at a variety of database conferences.

I have recently taken some time off for the first couple months of the year, and am coming back to a somewhat tougher market, given the state of the economy and recent developments in AI.

I run a monthly job opportunities post for my community to post jobs in their companies. My latest monthly job post has dropped down to 1 post, from 7 the previous month, and was at a steady ~8-12 through most of last year. My recent posts and moves towards AI have driven the most engagement in my community–I’ve seen widespread engagement around some recent AI capabilities added to my maintenance scripts and my query plan tuning website. Finally, my in-person trainings are doing well, my latest training (optimization based with a K-Pop demon hunters theme) about sql server optimization is close to selling out.

I already have committed resources towards producing new content at this time and I don’t have the bandwidth to work on a lot more right now.

I do have the ability to give away keys for my online training courses, and I’m willing to commit 10 or so to this project.

Provide 3 potential ways to choose from that let me leverage my current audience to bring in more clients to my business. 1 lighthearted and silly, 1 serious, and 1 that you think is most likely to bring ROI. Do not provide anything except the 3 projects.

ChatGPT 5.4’s response

1. “Worst Query of the Month” giveaway campaign
   Run a playful monthly contest across the blog, newsletter, YouTube roundup, and free scripts: people submit their ugliest real-world SQL Server performance problem, and you roast it lovingly, pick a winner, and give that person one of your training course keys. The point is not to create a mountain of new content, but to turn the content engine you already have into a lead magnet for people who have active pain right now. Require submissions to include company, environment size, what they already tried, and whether they want help fixing it internally or with outside consulting. That gives you a natural way to spot companies with budget, urgency, and messy workloads without acting salesy. At the end of each month, add one simple CTA everywhere: “If your team has a query you’re embarrassed to show in public, that’s usually when it’s time to bring in outside help.” This works because it is fun, highly on-brand for you, and directly surfaces warm consulting opportunities from people already admitting they have a problem. Brent says: the only problem with this is that I’d have to read all that hot garbage.
2. Manager-facing internal pitch kit for training and consulting
   Create one practical “send this to your boss” package and promote it repeatedly through your existing channels. Keep it small: one email template, one one-page PDF, and one short landing page section that explains when a company should buy training versus consulting, what business outcomes they should expect, and what kind of teams are the best fit. Your audience already trusts you technically, but many of them are not the buyer. They need help carrying your value proposition upward inside their company. Include language around budget efficiency, faster incident resolution, fewer wasted developer hours, and AI reality checks without hype. Then tie your 10 course keys to this by offering them as a bonus for companies that start a conversation: for example, “Book a call about team training or tuning help this month, and I’ll include a few course seats for your team.” This is serious, low-lift, and respectful of buyer integrity because it helps your champions make an honest internal business case instead of pushing gimmicks. Brent says: that’s genius, and I’m sure ChatGPT would do a good job of writing this kind of thing, too.
3. Free “AI Readiness for SQL Server Performance Tuning” consulting funnel
   This is the one most likely to drive ROI because it aligns with where you are already seeing unusual engagement. Package a tightly scoped offer for teams that are curious about AI but wary of nonsense: a short advisory session or mini-assessment on how to use AI safely in SQL Server performance tuning, code review, plan analysis, and incident response. Promote it through your blog, newsletter, query plan site, and FRK ecosystem as a limited-capacity offer for teams, not individuals. Position it as practical and skeptical: what AI is good at today, where it can waste time, how your tools now support it, and how to evaluate whether their environment is a fit. Use the 10 training keys as incentives for qualified conversations: “For the first 10 companies that book an assessment, I’ll include training access for your team leads.” This gives you a timely reason to talk to companies that may not have budgeted for classic consulting yet, but do have current interest and executive attention around AI. It also creates a clean bridge from community enthusiasm into paid advisory work without requiring you to produce a lot of brand-new material. Brent says: I bet this would work too, but then I’d have to build it, and the content would constantly age out because AI is changing so quickly.

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All in all, what a fun exercise! Thanks for joining in with me on that.