Before building or fundraising, validate if your idea aligns with current market trends by consulting one well-connected expert. This "zeitgeist check" quickly confirms if your concept is perceived as "hot or not," providing crucial early validation before investing significant resources and time.
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The goal of early validation is not to confirm your genius, but to risk being proven wrong before committing resources. Negative feedback is a valuable outcome that prevents building the wrong product. It often reveals that the real opportunity is "a degree to the left" of the original idea.
Never start a business without first validating demand by securing commitments from at least three initial clients. This strategy ensures immediate revenue and proves product-market fit from day one, avoiding the common trap of building a service that nobody wants to buy.
Friends provide biased feedback. For a truer market signal, launch a waitlist for your product on a relevant, niche online community like Hacker News. The volume of sign-ups from your target audience provides a far more realistic and valuable measure of initial demand than conversations with your personal network.
Spend significant time debating and mapping out a project's feasibility with a trusted group before starting to build. This internal stress-test is crucial for de-risking massive undertakings by ensuring there's a clear, plausible path to the end goal.
Instead of a traditional product launch, gauge market interest by tweeting about a personal problem and asking if others share it, framed as "Thinking of building an app...". This validates the idea and creates an initial beta list from interested replies before you invest heavily in development.
When an idea is met with a "wall of skepticism" from investors, it can be a positive sign of a good, non-obvious market. If every VC immediately validates your idea, it's likely too obvious and crowded. Proving early skeptics wrong with traction is a powerful path to building a defensible business.
Crisp.ai's founder advocates for selling a product before it's built. His team secured over $100,000 from 30 customers using only a Figma sketch. This approach provides the strongest form of market validation, proving customer demand and significantly strengthening a startup's position when fundraising with VCs.
Validate market demand by securing payment from customers before investing significant resources in building anything. This applies to software, hardware, and services, completely eliminating the risk of creating something nobody wants to buy.
To truly validate their idea, Moonshot AI's founders deliberately sought negative feedback. This approach of "trying to get the no's" ensures honest market signals, helping them avoid the trap of false positive validation from contacts who are just being polite.
Stop thinking of validation as a one-time step before you build. True validation is an ongoing process that applies to every business decision, from adding a feature to launching a new marketing channel. You are constantly validating until you sell the company.
