Find & validate your idea

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

1. The original short essay that named the wedge, the sharp entry point our short answer is really about. Dixon explains how to... Chris Dixon (cdixon.org) Essay · 8 min read The Thin Edge of the Wedge Strategy Chris Dixon
2. Rachitsky turns the wedge from a slogan into a decision, with worked examples like Twilio, Airbnb, and Amazon entering big... Lenny Rachitsky, Lenny's Newsletter Article · 18 min read Picking a Wedge Lenny Rachitsky
3. A practical companion to Dixon and Rachitsky, focused on choosing the exact first customer segment when the broader market is... Nathan Baschez, Every (every.to) Article · 15 min read The Market Wedge: How to Pick Your Initial Market Nathan Baschez, Eric Thompson
4. A founder-facing guide that ties market sizing to the question investors are really asking, and warns against describing only... 22nd Century Frontier Article · ~12 min read How Big Can This Get? A Founder's Guide to Market Sizing Petar Dimov
5. Blank separates a new market, where customers do something they could not before, from existing and resegmented markets, and... Inc. Article · ~8 min read Defining New Markets Steve Blank
6. This essay dismantles the seductive but hollow logic of if we just capture one percent of a huge market. It explains why that... Angus Norton, Predict Essay · 9 min read The 1% TAM Myth: Why Most Market Sizing Is Just Theater Angus Norton
7. A short, plain read on why the one percent capture argument backfires and how to reframe your sizing around real buyers. It... The Venture Crew Article · 8 min read Is the 1% Market Fallacy Holding Your Startup Back? Sahil S
8. A practical guide from a startup accelerator that walks through gathering the data behind both top-down and bottoms-up... MaRS Discovery District Article · 10 min read How to Estimate Market Size: Business and Marketing Planning for Startups MaRS Discovery District
9. A short India-focused primer on what a first pitch should cover, including where market size fits and how it shapes how much... Prime Venture Partners Article · 6 min read How to Pitch to a VC Prime Venture Partners
10. This is the foundational research on how new ideas actually spread through a population, and why some stick while others die.... Simon & Schuster Book · 576 pages Diffusion of Innovations Everett M. Rogers
11. The gap between a big market and a paying market is willingness to pay, and this piece gives you a rigorous way to actually... Kellogg Insight, Northwestern Article · ~10 min read A Better Way to Measure Customers' Willingness to Pay Kellogg Insight
12. This tackles the exact case where no budget line exists yet because the problem is new to buyers. Altman argues an unbudgeted... Forbes Article · ~8 min read Why Budget Doesn't Matter in B2B Selling Ian Altman
13. If your market is real but latent, meaning the pain exists but no one is actively shopping, this is the playbook for creating... Bessemer Venture Partners (Atlas) Article · ~15 min read A B2B Founder's Guide to Generating Demand from Scratch Bessemer Venture Partners
14. Blank shows that entering a new market, an existing one, or a resegmented niche demands completely different strategies, burn... steveblank.com Article Customer Development Manifesto: Market Type Steve Blank
15. Christensen explains why capable incumbents rationally ignore small, unproven, low margin new markets, which is exactly the... Harvard Business Review Press / Amazon Book · 288 pages The Innovator's Dilemma Clayton M. Christensen
16. This is a direct takedown of the round-number thinking our short answer warns against, written for founders who keep reaching... Startups.com Article · ~6 min read Avoid the Lame "1% of the Market" Approach Wil Schroter
17. A quick, plain read on why capturing one percent of a billion dollar market is a fantasy rather than a plan. It reinforces the... Inc. Article · ~5 min read The 1 Percent Fallacy That Trips Many Entrepreneurs Erik Sherman
18. This is a direct, practical breakdown of what a real why now looks like and how founders talk themselves into fake ones. It... Lenny's Newsletter Article · 15 min read Why now? Lenny Rachitsky
19. A stark case of the opposite bet: an entire Indian industry built on a court-defined skill-game loophole that a new law erased... TechCrunch Article India bans real-money gaming, threatening a $23 billion industry TechCrunch
20. The direct follow up that models your exact case: roughly a hundred customers each paying a million or more (his brontosaurus),... The Angel VC blog, by Christoph Janz Essay · 8 min read Three more ways to build a $100 million business Christoph Janz
21. Tunguz studied SaaS companies that went public and found there is no single right customer value. Large companies were built on... tomtunguz.com, by Tomasz Tunguz Article · 5 min read The Optimal Average Customer Value for SaaS Startups Tomasz Tunguz
22. Lemkin's point is that almost everything about your company, from the sales team to support to marketing spend, is set by your... SaaStr, by Jason Lemkin Article · 6 min read Everything is Sort of the Same at a Given ACV Jason Lemkin
23. If your business is a small number of very large accounts, this is a practical playbook for actually landing them. It lays out... Wiley, by Tom Searcy and Barbara Weaver Smith Book · 240 pages Whale Hunting: How to Land Big Sales and Transform Your Company Tom Searcy and Barbara Weaver Smith
24. This is the second act in action: once you own a narrow vertical, adding payments and fintech can more than double your... Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) Article · 10 min read Fintech Scales Vertical SaaS Kristina Shen, Kimberly Tan, Seema Amble, Angela Strange

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