Article · ~12 min read

How to Validate Your B2B Startup Idea

Lenny Rachitsky · Lenny's Newsletter Freemium Intermediate

If you are selling to companies rather than consumers, this is the specific playbook. Four concrete ways founders got signal before building, from doing the job by hand for one customer to interviewing dozens of potential users first.

  • Do the job by hand for one real customer before automating.
  • Interview a wide set of potential users before committing.
  • B2B signal looks different from consumer signal.
Open on lennysnewsletter.com ↗

It answers 11 questions

  1. What does 'validating an idea' actually mean?
  2. How do I validate an idea without building anything?
  3. Should I build an MVP at all, or can I validate without one?
  4. How do I actually validate my idea with a no-code prototype before I sink weeks into building the real thing?
  5. Should I validate an idea before I can code, or learn to build first?
  6. I want to test my idea before writing any code. What actually is a landing-page or concierge MVP and how do I run one right?
  7. My market is huge on paper but almost nobody is actually paying for solutions today. Good sign or bad?
  8. How is validating a B2B idea different from validating a consumer app?
  9. How many customer conversations should I do before I start building versus building a rough version to learn faster?
  10. How do I tell the difference between a nice-to-have problem and one people will actually change their behavior to fix?
  11. How do I validate an idea in a crowded market that already has big competitors?

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  3. The permission slip to recruit users by hand, do things manually, and deliver 'insanely great' experiences to your first few... paulgraham.com Essay · ~15 min read Do Things That Don't Scale Paul Graham
  4. Turns the vague feeling of product-market fit into a number you can move. Ask users how they would feel if they could no longer... First Round Review Article · ~20 min read How Superhuman Built an Engine to Find Product/Market Fit Rahul Vohra
  5. Todd Jackson studied how dozens of now-large companies validated their very first idea. The pattern that repeats: deliver the... Lenny's Newsletter Article · ~15 min read How to Validate Your Startup Idea Todd Jackson
  6. Video · ~13 min How to Plan an MVP Michael Seibel (YC)
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