This week, we’ve combed through our interviews with founders to surface the unexpected ways they sought to answer the question, “Should I build this?”
Is Your Startup Idea Any Good? Borrow These Validation Tactics from the Founders of Linear, Mercury and More
Every founder wants to validate their startup idea before they commit to it. But it’s not always obvious how to get the strongest signal.
Many turn to potential customers in an attempt to answer the biggest go or no-go question: “Does anyone want this?” But you can talk to 100 people and if you’re not intentional, you’ll get non-committal responses and divergent feedback that can lead you back to the drawing board.
Other what ifs loom that customers alone can’t inform. Is this idea feasible? Does it have the makings of a great business? Will you enjoy working on it?
Now with AI, you could even incorporate a prototype into your validation by vibe-coding an MVP and throwing it up on Twitter. But the stakes of choosing a great idea have only gotten higher in the AI era — because the hurdle of the build has gotten so much lower.
In our conversations with founders about the beginning of their product-market fit journeys, we’ve learned that there’s no one-size-fits all method of idea validation. Some founders used unconventional tactics for finding and talking to potential customers. Others turned to entirely different audiences, like industry experts and fellow founders, to get meaningful feedback to shape their ideas.
So to help you find inspiration for this process, we’ve rounded up a list of some of the more unexpected — and sometimes contradictory — approaches that we’ve seen. Here’s a sneak peek at this validation toolkit:
- Run minimum viable tests. Repeat entrepreneur and Maven co-founder and CEO Gagan Biyani has devised a framework for pressure-testing ideas without a product: the Minimum Viable Test. “An MVT is a test of an essential hypothesis — something you must be right about, or else the company won’t stand a chance,” he says. For Maven, that meant testing whether professionals would be willing to pay 10X more for a cohort-based course than an asynchronous course by actually running a course himself.
- Go undercover at your day job. Linear’s Karri Saarinen wanted to build a better issue-tracking tool than the one he’d been using as a principal designer at Airbnb. Long before he quit to work on the idea, he did recon with coworkers to validate that folks just like him felt the same problem. “What was interesting was that a lot of people had lots to say and clearly saw a problem. But no one said, ‘I wish you could solve this.’ They hadn’t even thought about it. The incumbent in this market is like the floors in the building — you don’t think about the floors, you just walk on them,” he says.
- Don’t pitch your friends. Ryan Glasgow did the opposite when validating his idea for Sprig. He kept his outreach cold to see if prospects were truly interested — and not just doing him a solid by looking at a product mockup. “One of the key learnings I had early is to never involve people who you personally know in the customer development process. Folks often reach out to their own audience for customer development, but I think it’s often misleading,” he says.
- See if other founders have idea FOMO. To narrow down a list of ideas for his third startup, Crossbeam’s Bob Moore pitched his contenders to other founders. “With founders, I wasn’t asking, ‘Would you buy this?’ But instead, ‘Would you start this company? And what are the things that you think you might bump into?’” he says. “Rather than narrowing these ideas down into the scope of how a persona would use it, I was able to broaden my horizons of what they could become.”
Thanks, as always, for reading and sharing!
-The Review Editors