theleanstartup.com

Answers What does 'validating an idea' actually mean? How do I validate an idea without building anything? What is an MVP and what's the smallest one I can build? How do I run a landing-page / 'fake-door' test? When should I pivot vs. persevere? How do I run customer discovery as an Indian founder building for Indian users? What actually counts as an MVP, and what's the smallest one I can get away with? How do I decide which features to cut from v1? How long should building an MVP take? Should I build an MVP at all, or can I validate without one? What's the difference between an MVP and just a cheap, half-finished product? How often should an early-stage startup ship? How do I build a roadmap without over-planning? Isn't doing things that don't scale a waste of time, shouldn't I automate from day one? When is my product 'ready' to launch? What business model should I choose for my startup? How do I make money from a free product or freemium model? How do I know when to stop researching an idea and just start building? Should I validate an idea before I can code, or learn to build first? How do I evaluate whether an idea is big enough to be worth years of my life? My co-founder and I keep debating two ideas and cannot agree, how do we decide? What is a concierge or Wizard of Oz MVP and when should I use one? Do I even have a real problem, or just a solution I'm attached to? How do I know when I've validated enough to actually start building? I have deep experience but only as an employee, never a founder. Does that still count as founder-market fit? How do I honestly test my founder-market fit before I quit my job? What are the most common mistakes founders make when they try to build on a hot trend? What's the difference between a customer saying they'll pay and actually pulling out a card, and how do I test the real one early? How do I do user research when I'm building something nobody has seen before and can't describe what they want? How many customer conversations should I do before I start building versus building a rough version to learn faster? How do I tell the difference between a nice-to-have problem and one people will actually change their behavior to fix? I'm non-technical and can't afford a developer. Can I ship a real MVP with no-code tools, or will that trap me later? How do I decide the single riskiest assumption my MVP should test instead of trying to prove the whole idea at once? I keep polishing the design and refactoring instead of shipping. How do I know I'm gold-plating my MVP versus doing necessary work? Should my MVP be a mobile app or a web app? My users are mostly on phones in smaller Indian cities. How much should I spend building an MVP as a bootstrapped founder in India, and where does the money actually leak? How do I actually validate my idea with a no-code prototype before I sink weeks into building the real thing? I built my MVP on no-code but my technical co-founder wants to rewrite it in real code. When is that migration actually worth it? I'm a domain expert with no coding background. Should I spend a month learning a no-code tool myself or hire a no-code freelancer? Should I build my MVP on no-code before I hire any developers? How much should an MVP realistically cost to build in India? What are the warning signs a developer is building the wrong thing? How much should I invest in design polish for an MVP versus just shipping something functional? How do I know when something we shipped is actually working versus just launched? Should we ship an ugly, half-working version now or wait until it feels good enough to be proud of? Everyone says do things that don't scale, but where's the line between that and just wasting weeks doing manual work? I keep tweaking the landing page instead of launching. How do I tell polishing from procrastinating? My co-founder wants a big coordinated launch, I want to just ship quietly and iterate. Who's right? How do I actually measure whether a launch worked, beyond the vanity upvotes and traffic spike? I relaunched a product that failed the first time. How do I frame it so it doesn't look like I'm just recycling a flop? How much of my week should I spend on sales versus building the product in the early days?