Find & validate your idea

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

1. Judging whether people will actually change their behavior comes down to how well you can hear intensity in what they say, and... deployempathy.com Book · Full book, roughly 250 pages Deploy Empathy: A Practical Guide to Interviewing Customers Michele Hansen In 2 answers
2. Aulet turns beachhead selection into an explicit, sequenced process (market segmentation, then picking one beachhead, then... Wiley Book Disciplined Entrepreneurship: 24 Steps to a Successful Startup Bill Aulet In 2 answers
3. This is the canonical piece that put jobs to be done on the map, written by the people who coined it. It uses the famous... Harvard Business Review Article · ~20 min read Know Your Customers' Jobs to Be Done Clayton Christensen et al. In 2 answers
4. A dominant player with 80 percent share is almost always over-serving its most profitable customers and quietly ignoring the... Harvard Business Review Essay · About 20 minute read What Is Disruptive Innovation? Clayton M. Christensen, Michael E. Raynor, and Rory McDonald In 2 answers
5. Sajith Pai is an India VC, and he tells on himself here: he passed on WhiteHat Jr. by trusting a headline India TAM number,... sajithpai.com Essay TAM: Notes & Thoughts Sajith Pai In 2 answers
6. This is the founder essay that made the case for validating before you build, from the person who did it with Buffer. Gascoigne... Medium (Joel Gascoigne, co-founder of Buffer) Essay How to successfully validate your idea with a Landing Page MVP Joel Gascoigne In 2 answers
7. Ben Thompson's framework explains why the sharpest modern businesses give the product away and win by owning the demand side,... Stratechery Essay Aggregation Theory Ben Thompson In 2 answers
8. Before you tune CAC and take rate, this book gives you the structural picture of why marketplace economics compound: network... W. W. Norton & Company Book Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy and How to Make Them Work for You Geoffrey G. Parker, Marshall W. Van Alstyne, Sangeet Paul Choudary In 2 answers
9. This is the guide for the check-in itself: what to actually say when you sit down. Perel names the three things co-founder... First Round Review Article · 20 min read How to Fix the Co-Founder Fights You're Sick of Having: Lessons from Couples Therapist Esther Perel Esther Perel (via First Round Review) In 2 answers
10. Concrete stories of Indian founders who went to where their customers were before building, like Shiprocket's founder... Penguin Random House India Article · 10 min read How India's Top Startup Founders Validated Their Business Ideas Penguin Random House India In 2 answers
11. A step by step process for taking an idea to something people want without building the wrong product first. Maurya's mantra,... Ash Maurya (O'Reilly) Book · ~336 pages Running Lean (3rd Edition) Ash Maurya In 2 answers
12. The qualitative half of the answer, told through founders describing the moment things flipped: inbound you cannot keep up... Lenny's Newsletter Article · ~2,000 words What it feels like when you've found product-market fit Lenny Rachitsky In 2 answers
13. A useful correction for founders chasing a market-wide 40 percent before a single cohort loves the product. The authors argue... Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) Article · ~2,000 words Product-User Fit Comes Before Product-Market Fit Peter Lauten and David Ulevitch In 2 answers
14. A practical roundup of demand-testing models, including the 'dry wallet' or pre-sales test where you ask for payment before the... RevenueCat Blog Article · ~15 min read 5 Proven Models for Testing Customer Demand RevenueCat In 2 answers
15. This is the operational how-to for the depth path: how to structure a design partnership so it produces real validation, not... Common Paper Article · 10 min read How To Work With Design Partners Jake Stein (Common Paper) In 2 answers
16. This lays out a cheap, staged way to test whether an idea has real pull before you build anything, which maps directly onto... First Round Review Article · ~20 min read The Minimum Viable Testing Process for Evaluating Startup Ideas Gagan Biyani In 2 answers
17. Concrete evidence that building outside Bengaluru, Mumbai, and Delhi is not a handicap but increasingly an advantage, from... YourStory Article How Tier 2 Cities Are Powering India's Next Startups YourStory In 2 answers
18. A short, clear framing of the difference between a nice to have and a must have. It helps you honestly ask whether people would... Forbes Article · ~7 min read Is Your Startup Building a Vitamin or a Painkiller? George Deeb In 2 answers
19. Ramanujam argues that putting willingness to pay at the very centre of product design, before you build, is what separates... First Round Review Article It's Price Before Product. Period. Madhavan Ramanujam In 2 answers
20. When incumbents all compete on the same features for the same buyers, this book shows how to redraw the offer so you are not... W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne Book · ~250 pages Blue Ocean Strategy W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne In 2 answers
21. The book that coined get out of the building and launched the customer development movement. Blank's core claim is that a... Wiley Book The Four Steps to the Epiphany Steve Blank In 2 answers
22. Blank's core idea, get out of the building, is the discipline that lets a non-technical founder create real value before... steveblank.com Article Customer Development: Get Out of the Building Steve Blank In 2 answers
23. This is the concrete how-to for collecting problems on purpose. It walks through Amy Hoy's Sales Safari method, where you... O'Reilly (Scott Hurff) Article · About 12 min read How to Create Products People Want (Sales Safari) Scott Hurff In 2 answers
24. Savoia, a former Google innovation lead, argues most ideas fail because they were never 'the right it', and he gives you cheap... Alberto Savoia Book · 256 pages The Right It Alberto Savoia In 2 answers

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