Is Idea Validation important to you?

Just the other day I came across this: https://www.producthunt.com/post... by @hvost

Personally, I solve my own problems. I have a 100% guarantee that there will always be a market of 1. Then I google if someone already did my idea, then I get depressed because there are a billion solutions. So I stopped validating before I start, worst case, it will be a learning experience, best case, it will work out.

I am sure you know the Mom Test book - that's what our team always does before putting any effort into development or marketing

In the past I tried the blind build, no validation, quick research, just start and see how it goes. That never worked for me. My current project (https://www.moneyminx.com) is solving a problem I have. I've had this problem for a long time and I solved it with an Excel sheet that I keep updated monthly. It's tedious, it's painful, I would rather do a million other things than update this sheet manually every month. For months I looked around for tools that solve the problem. I tried them all. None worked. I posted in endless forums with people that have the same problem. Asking how they solved the problem. Most said it was not properly solved yet or they are using Excel. Finally over a year from the idea inception I am now finally starting to build!

Most of the time, if I have an idea, I'm going to try to put it out there as fast as possible before investing too much time building the actual product. I'll either talk about it on social media or set up a landing page to check if people are interested. If the idea generates interest, I'll start a conversation with potential users/customers to see what they actually need. It helps build a product that truly helps people.

I look at the existing solutions to the problem, and see what people are complaining about in terms of that solution. Then I see how to solve those complaints :)

Not really. From the looks of the world now, i reckon putting it out there for someone to try it. If it assists, great. It just takes one person to discover it, be amazed, rave and share about it then the ripple effect that everyone wants a piece of it. Then it becomes the hype for the time being. You'd then see value and try to make subtle iterations and updated features which could make some people happy or disappointed that they leave. But at least you can say you tried, it was good for the time being🙃

Some time ago, in a local Hackerspace, we started hosting Idea Squash sessions. Anybody with an idea can come to the session. Each person has one idea to pitch and all the other participants (usually coming from different backgrounds) comment on this idea. What are the strong points, what are some week points, what could be improved. Sometimes, people offer contacts to others who could help implementing that. I like this formula very much and that's how I often validate some of my craziest ideas.

Hi Conor, great question, I have a concept called DriveThruCam.com (nothing up). The app would send an alert to your phone when the local drive-thru is down to 4 cars or less (thats the patent-pending side of the app) ....but I need access to the cameras on the restaurant or put up my own cams. I've gotten positive feedback bc of the long drive-thru lines due to COVID but its hard to get in touch with the franchise owners. My second concept is called FastFoodCam.com, this app would allow you to watch your food being made in the kitchen of any restaurant bc in the age of COVID I don't trust a lot of these fast-food workers. But again, need restaurant buy-in for both of these and they would need to put cams up in the kitchen, smart restaurants would use this as a marketing tool to show transparency, like Whataburger or Chipotle, they pride themselves on cleanliness. These are a couple of concepts that I need validating. Neither site is up and I just thought of both of these a couple of days ago. (I hope this posting doesn't violate any terms, not promoting anything, just want feedback on my ideas.)

Build a community around the product or problem youre solving. Foster the community and have chats. Get people engaged and add relevant content. Skip cold sales by making your sales way warmer. Sales is a tough game but doesn't have to be impossibly dehumanized by building and hoping someone shows up to your landing page to capture their email.

I used to be obsessed with idea validation but after reading lean startup and disciplined entrepreneurship books, I shifted to problem/solution fit validation. Understanding the problems that customers or users have is way important step in the journey of your startup. 1. Understand your Market (TAM, SAM, and NM) 2. Create End users profile. 3. Find your first persona. 4. Validate they have the problem 5. Find 10 like them to make sure many users have the problem. 6. Build MVP and sell it to them. 7. Use their feedback to improve and build the product. (in this stage you should find product/market fit) Usually you need 1 enterprise customer to validate PMF, but for SMB and consumers you need a significant amount. 8. Raise money to scale. I hope this help.

you should talk with the sales guys. We normally known what the customers want or can easily ask our customers about your idea. Give me a buzz a will happily help you +56992997018 (whatsapp)

Here is my take - The lens I use is my own personal curiosity. I have a lot of ideas, but only a few that I dive in to really educate myself about the space/opportunity. If after doing some learning I am still curious, then I will create a "Practice" of sorts. I am a sports person so it's like going out and hitting 🏌️‍♀️ (I am not actually a golfer:) but you get the point. The practice includes a prototype (especially if there is a tech hurdle to confirm the idea is actually possible). Practice also includes pitching the concept to peers and potential customers. Does it feel right to talk about it? Are they interested? If the product makes it through this phase, then I quickly switch to growth. Can I get the product to gain traction? Sign early customers, build enough of the vision to have people try it? Are basic metrics trending up? If it passes this stage, then I circle back to education and learning to refine what I encountered the first time through this process. That should lead to more growth and so on... Hope this helps and makes sense. ping me if you want to see a graphic I created to share this concept with my team - Education>curiosity>practice>growth

It's important for you to list down the use cases of your product. Based on those use cases, reach out to the specific target audience, talk to them about your product, understand what are their pain points and improvise based on their feedback. This could be done for your initial set of beta users. Everyone out there has is facing some challenge which they hope can be fixed. To get to know those challenges, you have to identify them and the best way to do that is to validate it from the end user itself. This will give you a better idea on how to solve the specific pain points in a problem statement. Also, you mind find the USP for your product when you start validating. The feature which has the maximum likes is definitely going to be one adding most value to your product. Conclusion, YES! Validation plays a key role.