How do you validate your SaaS ideas before writing the first line of code?

Hey Product Hunt community! 👋

We’ve all been there: you get a "brilliant" SaaS idea at 2 AM, spend the next few weeks locked in a room vibing and writing code, launch it, and... crickets. No one buys it because no one actually needed it. Spending months building something nobody wants is the ultimate founder nightmare.

For my upcoming launch, Review2Idea, I decided to force myself to take a completely different approach. Instead of guessing what people want, I went straight to where the pain already exists: 1-3 star App Store reviews.

Users in those comment sections are literally begging for solutions to their problems. So I built an AI pipeline to parse thousands of these messy, unstructured complaints and map them directly into actionable MVP specs and micro-SaaS formulas. It saved me hundreds of hours of blind brainstorming.

But I know everyone has their own playbook. Some swear by building a landing page first and running ads. Others do cold Twitter/LinkedIn outreach, while some just cruise through Reddit.

So I'm curious, especially for solo makers and bootstrapped teams:

How do you validate your SaaS ideas before writing your first line of code? What’s your highest-converting validation framework?

Let’s chat in the comments! 👇