Artist's co-founder warns that the biggest mistake founders make is building technology too early. Her team validated their text-based learning concept by manually texting early users, confirming the core hypothesis and user engagement before committing significant engineering resources.

Instead of requiring user sign-ups for a complex AI assistant, EasyMedicine launched a simple, anonymous tool to find medication savings. This approach provides immediate value, attracting target users for conversations and validation without the friction of account creation, ensuring they build what patients actually need.

The old model of raising a large sum of money to build infrastructure is obsolete. Today, founders can and should validate their product and find customers with minimal capital *before* seeking significant investment, reversing the traditional order of operations.

The initial version of ServiceUp had no assets, mechanics, or overhead. It was a pure arbitrage play: taking customer orders from a failed auto shop, farming them out to other shops at wholesale rates, and profiting from the margin. This validated the business model's financial viability before any technology was built.

Validate business ideas by creating a fake prototype or wireframe and selling it to customers first. This confirms demand and secures revenue before you invest time and money into development, which the speaker identifies as the hardest part of validation.

In the earliest stages, the goal isn't a profitable P&L but proving people want your product. Spot & Tango's founder hand-delivered orders at a loss, prioritizing demand validation over unit economics, which could be optimized later.

Before committing to a costly lease and build-out for a restaurant, the speaker tested the concept with a delivery-only model from a commissary kitchen. This pre-MVP approach, now known as a cloud kitchen, validated the idea with minimal capital and risk.

Validate startup ideas by building the simplest possible front end—what the customer sees—while handling all back-end logistics manually. This allows founders to prove customers will pay for a concept before over-investing in expensive technology, operations, or infrastructure.

Replace speculative feedback from discovery calls with a process that would be "weird if it didn't work." First, get strangers to pre-pay for a solution. Then, deliver it manually. This confirms real demand (payment) and validates the solution's value (retention) before writing code.