Find & validate your idea

What founders use for find & validate your idea, ranked by how many answers lean on it.

1. Validation in B2B bleeds straight into early sales, and this answers the real questions founders hit when they start selling to... First Round Review Article · 18 min read The Most Common Go-to-Market Questions This Expert Gets from Early Founders Emery Rosansky (First Round Review)
2. A head-on comparison of the exact question you are asking, useful as an orientation before the deeper resources. It draws out... Bundl Article · 12 min read B2B vs B2C Venture Validation: Key Differences Bundl
3. Aulet, who runs MIT's entrepreneurship center, lays out how to do primary research properly: observe, listen, and interact with... VentureWell (Bill Aulet, MIT) Article · medium read A Practical Guide to Primary Market Research Bill Aulet
4. Lenny interviewed dozens of people who built Airbnb, DoorDash, Thumbtack, Etsy, and Uber, then distilled how they actually got... Lenny's Newsletter Article · ~25 min read How to Kickstart and Scale a Marketplace Business (Part 1) Lenny Rachitsky
5. Once you decide supply is the harder side to get, this piece is the tactical playbook for signing up those first suppliers by... Lenny's Newsletter Article · ~25 min read How to Kickstart and Scale a Marketplace Business (Part 3): Growing Initial Supply Lenny Rachitsky
6. Written by an investor who founded and sold a marketplace himself, this is a structured handbook covering business models,... Version One Ventures Article · ~45 min read A Guide to Marketplaces Boris Wertz and Angela Tran
7. Grinda has backed over a thousand marketplaces, and his blunt take is that roughly 95 percent are demand constrained, not... Fabrice Grinda Essay · ~30 min read Lessons Learned Building Online Marketplaces Fabrice Grinda
8. Udemy's cofounder explains, with real numbers, how they hand recruited supply when cold calls failed, even creating a course... The Hustle Article · ~15 min read How Udemy Found Their First 1,000 Instructors Sam Parr
9. If you do not want to read the whole book, this is Ries in his own words defining the MVP in a few pages. His guiding rule is... Eric Ries (Medium) Article The Minimum Viable Product: A Primer Eric Ries
10. A tight, practical breakdown of what a concierge MVP is actually testing, using the Food on the Table example step by step. It... Res Extensa (Coleman McCormick) Article Learning from the Concierge MVP Coleman McCormick
11. Kromatic works with corporate and startup teams on lean experiments, and this piece is precise about the difference and the... Kromatic Article Wizard of Oz Prototyping vs. Concierge Test Kromatic
12. A practical walkthrough of when a concierge MVP is the right fit, when it is not, and how to actually run one. It is helpful... Upsilon Article What Is a Concierge MVP and When to Use It Upsilon
13. This is the piece written for exactly your situation: no audience, no network, no obvious way to reach the people you need.... A Smart Bear (Jason Cohen) Article When You Have Nothing: How to Find Customers to Interview Jason Cohen
14. The consumer counterpart to finding B2B customers, focused on manually recruiting your first users for a consumer product. It... Lenny's Newsletter Article How to Find Your Early Adopters by Doing Things That Don't Scale Lenny Rachitsky
15. The reference book on interview craft itself: how to build rapport, ask follow ups, and manage your own bias in the room.... Rosenfeld Media Book · 248 pages Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights (2nd Edition) Steve Portigal
16. Torres makes the single most important move concrete: instead of asking what people generally do, ask them to tell you about a... Product Talk Article · 15 min read Story-Based Customer Interviews Uncover Much-Needed Context Teresa Torres
17. A direct answer to the question every founder types into search: what should I actually ask. Torres argues for throwing away... Product Talk Article · 12 min read Ask Teresa: What Are the Best Customer Interview Questions? Teresa Torres
18. A founder story about doing customer research so carefully that you learn things you did not want to hear. It shows what... First Round Review Article · 20 min read Webflow's Path to Product-Market Fit: Lessons on Rigorous Customer Empathy First Round Review
19. Written by the person who grew Superhuman's waitlist past half a million, so it is candid about what a big number does and does... Growth by Gaurav (Substack) Essay The Waitlist Delusion Gaurav Vohra
20. A short, plain piece that names the exact trap in this question: a curiosity click reads as demand when it is not. It gives... saasvalidation.tech Article Pre-launch waitlists measure curiosity, not intent saasvalidation.tech
21. A breakdown of how Superhuman turned a waitlist into a filter using onboarding calls, surveys, and referral gating, so joining... Waitlister Article Superhuman's Waitlist Case Study: 180K Users at $30/Month Waitlister
22. Kamath spells out a hard Indian truth: services that Americans pay a premium for, Indians expect for free, so the same feature... Business Today Article Robinhood charges for speed, India gives it free: Nithin Kamath drops a brutal reality check Nithin Kamath (via Business Today)
23. Pike weighs pre-selling honestly, including when a signed commitment truly validates demand and when it does not fit your... Allen Pike Essay Sell First, or Build First? Allen Pike
24. A short, tactical list of ways to test willingness to pay, from small paid pilots to letters of intent to pricing-page click... The Glimpse Article 6 Practical Ways to Find Out if Your Customers are Willing to Pay The Glimpse

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