🕵️♀️ How do you validate a startup idea?
Saša Starčević
21 replies
👨🏻💻 - Idea validation should be done before any coding
🎳 - Ask friends
📨 - Emailing or discuss with your followers
🏘 - Post on social media
📚 - Make a blog
💬 - Ask for feedback on multiple social media
🚀 - Use Ship (by ProductHunt)
🔬 What is your advice?
Replies
Simon Blok@simon_blok
All of these are good options i think, but if possible, building a small MVP can also be a good way to get extra feedback.
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@simonblok Thank you so much for your help. We are thinking about making an MVP / Beta version. We are trying to understand how much functionality is necessary for the MVP version.
@simonblok I 2nd this. Nothing is better than an MVP when validating an idea. There are too many ways to wind up with false positives or false negatives when using other methods.
"Idea validation should be done before any coding" Well it actually depends on your skill set:
- I'm not a designer so making a landing page for testing takes me a lot of time.
- On the other developing some datamining scripts, which return some excel file, takes me only few hours. So I usually test my idea by offering those excel file as a consulting service (that is how I tested QApop for a year).
Outreaching influencer in our target market is a nice way to get feedback:
- Check top influencer on Quora
- check people active on relevant hastag on linkedin
I would avoid asking friend, as they might give you some good feedbacks to please you. To validated the idea you want to get feedback from strangers.
Indie Hacker & https://lunadio.party are nice place to ask for feedbacks.
@fabian_maume Thank you very much for your help. I have started asking on IH and will check for this lunadio.party.
Very nice landing page setup is here on ProductHunt:
https://www.producthunt.com/ship...
@fabian_maume No freaking way! This comment just made my day. I was working on a product almost like QApop at a Hackathon back in 2016. We made a quick scraping prototype (although we had a bit of issue getting through Quora's login page for the scraper). So cool to see that you've actually turned it into a full product.
Our reason for developing it was to make it easier for content creators to find new topics to blog about that would answer actual questions. Yours focus more on posting organically on Quora, but the overall idea of scraping Quora questions as a way of finding important topics is the same.
Best of luck to you and the platform! :)
Spend all of your effort going from 0 to 1 without building anything beyond a mock up (manual processes on the back end) until it's clear your user(s) will actually use it. YC would always remind us to figure out how to make 100 users extremely happy, then they will help you get your next wave of growth (promoters). That involves a lot of customer development (talk to users, study their actions). Think in terms of first principles, understand the foundational truths and don't just run off and build what they're asking for. Then there are growth hacking channels to experiment with. Iterate rapidly.
@dwshorowitz Thank you very much for this valuable information.
We are trying to create mock videos for our upcoming product and present them to the world.
The video contains features that should be covered in the product, we are discussing with potential users and try to get as many as possible subscribers to validate our idea.
A pitch deck is also good as it forces you to explain your ideas in a short number of slides and of course you can use that to raise funds
@reportingaccts I'm not sure what is "pitch deck". Please, can you elaborate a little bit more or provide some link, because I'm not familiar with this terminology.
If I need it myself, nothing like that exists and I would be willing to pay for it, I know it has its (maybe small, but real) market.
My advice is to talk with people you don't know about your product idea (Reddit can be a great place for this), to hear what they have to say. Listening to their current frustrations / thoughts on your idea can help you avoid early mistakes or fix incorrect assumptions that you have to look further into.
What to look out for when validating
(1) Is the product able to meet the needs and wants of the market?
(2) Is the startup idea technically feasible and financially viable?
How to carry out validation
(1) Primary Research - Go out and speak to as many people as possible about your idea.
(2) Secondary Research - Validate the market and carry out competitor analysis.
Post-Validation: Pivoting and the Feedback Loop
Start building your initial prototypes and carry out validation on the product to test its technical feasibility.
It's not about the idea, it's about the dream. Keep follow your dream