Getting Validation for Your Product

The fastest, cheapest form of validation is a conversation. Find ten to twenty people who have the problem you're solving and ask them how they deal with it today, what they've tried, and what's still frustrating. You're listening for patterns in their pain, not pitching your solution. If you can't get people to talk about the problem, that's information too.

People are generally polite and will often say an idea sounds great even when they'd never pay for it. What they do is a far more reliable signal than what they say. A landing page that collects real email signups, a waitlist people actually join, or a manual version of your product that a handful of people pay for or use repeatedly tells you more than a dozen enthusiastic conversations.

You don't need a finished product to validate demand. Identify the single riskiest assumption behind your idea, the thing that, if false, means the business doesn't work, and design the smallest possible test for it. That might be a concierge version you run by hand for five customers, a simple prototype, or even a well-targeted ad that links to a signup page.

Decide in advance what result would convince you to keep going versus change direction. Without a threshold set ahead of time, it's easy to reinterpret any result as encouraging. "Twenty percent of people who saw the landing page signed up" only means something if you decided beforehand what number would count as a real signal.