Ideas & Opportunity

Validating your idea

Get evidence before you write code.

Level All Beginner Intermediate
Who's asking Everyone Aspiring Founder Idea-Stage Founder Builder Launcher Grower
What does 'validating an idea' actually mean? Validation is gathering real-world evidence that a specific group of people has a painful problem AND will change their behaviour (pay, sign up, sw... Beginner 3 resources → How do I know if my idea is any good? Judge it on the problem, not the solution: is it a real, frequent, painful problem for a reachable group of people, and are you unusually well-plac... Beginner 4 resources → How do I validate an idea without building anything? Replace the product with a conversation, a manual service, or a landing page. Interview people about the problem, hand-deliver the outcome yourself... Beginner 3 resources → How do I talk to customers without getting false positives? Never pitch your idea in the interview, it invites polite lies. Ask about their real life and past behaviour: the last time they hit the problem, w... Beginner 3 resources → How many people should I talk to, and how do I find them? Aim for enough that patterns repeat, often 15-30 focused conversations before signal stabilises. Find them by going where the problem lives: your o... Beginner 3 resources → What is an MVP and what's the smallest one I can build? An MVP is the least you can build (or fake) to learn whether your riskiest assumption is true. Often it isn't software at all: a manual service, a ... Beginner 3 resources → How do I run a landing-page / 'fake-door' test? Put up a simple page that describes the offer as if it's real, drive a bit of targeted traffic to it, and measure whether people take a costly-to-t... Intermediate 2 resources → How do I know if I've found product-market fit? You can feel it (customers pull the product out of your hands, word of mouth spreads) and now you can measure it: survey users with 'how would you ... Intermediate 5 resources → When should I pivot vs. persevere? Decide on evidence, on a schedule, not on a bad week. If repeated experiments aren't moving your key learning metric toward fit despite honest iter... Intermediate 3 resources →