When repeat founder Bob Moore was mulling over ideas for his third startup, he didn’t simply talk to potential customers to suss out demand for a few of his favorite ideas. He turned to fellow 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. Turns out most of the founders he spoke to chose the same idea. It was through this “founder discovery” that he singled out the one that would eventually become his current company, Crossbeam.
Moore’s unconventional method of validation got us thinking about how founders find conviction for their startup ideas — and how deeply personal that process can be. And while AI tools have certainly lowered the technical hurdles and shortened the timeline to build and validate prototypes, the stakes of problem selection remain high as ever. This is something you could spend upward of 10 years of your life working on. No pressure.
There’s no shortage of prescriptive advice floating around on how you should approach this process: Talk to X amount of customers, listen for a repeated pain point, get to work building a solution that addresses it. But the process is rarely ever that straightforward. Who should you talk to? Which questions should you ask? How can you parse out glimmers of potential from non-committal answers?
So we’ve revisited our interviews with founders from companies like Linear and Mercury to surface the strategies they used to find conviction in their ideas long before writing a single line of code. Some did talk to potential customers, but used unconventional tactics to get a deeper read on the market. Others, like Moore, turned to entirely different audiences — like industry experts and fellow founders — to get meaningful feedback to shape their ideas.
If the sheer variety of methods we’ve included here is any indication, there’s no singular scientific way to validate your startup idea. Take your pick of what fits with your problem and market — or maybe even try a mix to get an even stronger signal.
Get more mileage out of your customer interviews
Customer discovery is a well-trodden — and some would say essential — path for startup idea validation. But the mere act of talking to anyone you might sell to doesn’t guarantee you’ll walk away learning something. Here’s how you can find the right folks to chat with, design intentional interviews and make sure no one’s blowing smoke.
Run minimum viable tests
Gagan Biyani, repeat founder and now CEO of Maven, has developed an alternative to the MVP designed for the sole purpose of validating an idea before you build. It’s called the Minimum Viable Test.
“I’ve been early at four startups: Udemy, Lyft, Sprig and Maven. Three of them achieved over $1M in run-rate in their first six months of going live. I don’t think this is an accident. I generally think this early success could’ve been predicted before a single line of code was written,” says Biyani.
He attributes this track record to his now-codified MVT method.
“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.
First, define the “atomic unit” of your idea. Then test it. “For Google, the atomic unit is a search query. For Amazon, it’s ordering a book online. For Coinbase, it’s an easier way to buy and sell crypto,” says Biyani.
He lays out these four steps to test the atomic unit, along with examples of how he used this framework for Maven:
- Pick a clear and specific atomic unit. The more niche the better in this case. You are looking for the smallest possible item that you could distill your product down to. This unit is important because consumers rarely ever buy the value proposition of a company, they buy a specific item that you are selling. “For Maven, the atomic unit is a cohort-based course. How can we test whether cohort-based courses work as quickly as possible?” he says.
- Define your risky assumption and test just one at a time. You will almost always get 2-3 risky assumptions tested in one go, but there should always be a primary. If there isn’t, you won’t get conclusive results. For Maven, the riskiest assumption was that folks may not be willing to pay 10x more for a cohort-based course than for an asynchronous course.
- Devise a test for that specific assumption. If your riskiest hypothesis is execution risk: test out execution by actually trying to deliver the goods or services in as hack-y a way as possible. “For Maven, the primary risk is a profit question: on a per-seat basis, cohort-based courses are more expensive to produce than video-based ones,” says Biyani. “So my first MVT was to figure out the revenue-profit ratio of a course: Will consumers be satisfied with buying a cohort-based course for a significantly higher price point than video-based courses?”
- When devising a test, don't build out everything. Focus only on the hypothesis. Biyani wound up running just one course to test the risky assumptions for Maven. “I picked a specific area that I knew well and then tried to run a course on that subject. I found a partner who already had a big adjacent business (Sam Parr at TheHustle) and asked him if he would co-teach a course with me. This allowed me to test a course without having to build a marketing machine from scratch,” he says. “It was a hyper-narrow test that achieved the exact result I was looking for: The course had a 9/10 rating from its students and made over $150,000 in revenue in its first cohort.”
“The goal of this framework is not to prevent failure. That’s impossible. The goal is to increase your chances of success,” says Biyani.
For each MVT you run, you should ask yourself again: Now that I’ve proven or disproven that risk, what are other risks I should be considering and testing against?
Test your sales chops with a product that doesn’t exist
Like Biyani, Material Security’s Ryan Noon and Abhishek Agrawal took the test-the-idea-without-a-product approach. When they teamed up to start a company together without a problem in mind, they took a running list of startup ideas and narrowed it down to four.
But to choose the winner, they took “lean” to another level — and decided to head straight to selling. “We knew all four ideas were good,” says Noon. “They were all good markets, and we all felt like we could start a company around any of them. But we knew one idea would be way easier to sell than the others, and the only way to find out was to try.”
To do that, they devised a sales test they called “marketing vignettes.” No demo, no landing page, no mockup. Just pitch decks built to look like pared-down sales landing pages, with descriptions of different features.
“It was mostly us asserting each bullet point and seeing if there was pushback, which got us honest feedback very quickly,” says Agrawal.
These vignettes were highly effective for two reasons:
- They gauged interest without overwhelming. “There was just enough UI to convey a concept without letting you get bogged down in it with a customer,” Agrawal says.
- They allowed the founders to experiment with messaging. “A big part of finding product-market fit early on is testing messaging,” he says. “When you make slides, it lets you skip product marketing because you're just thinking about bullet points that list features. But when you make marketing vignettes, you have to name your features and also convey in a couple sentences what the benefits are. It forces you to exercise muscles around positioning and marketing.”
Over the next few months, the founders spent every day pitching each of the four ideas to different prospects. Eventually, a clear winner emerged. Here’s how they knew:
- There was a clear sales champion within enterprise organizations. “Just the act of having to go through LinkedIn and identify people to try to sell our product to was a huge qualifier because it was like, ‘We got 20 meetings on this one. And only two on the other.’ That tells you something,” says Agrawal.
- After the pitch, prospects had questions. Instead of, “Sounds cool,” the founders heard reactions like, “I want to show this to the rest of my team,” “When will this be ready?”“How much does it cost?” and “How long does it take to integrate?”
Go undercover at your day job
If your coworkers fall into your ICP, the validation phase is a great time to conduct some research at the office — before you’ve officially donned the founder hat. This is especially useful if you’re thinking about an idea born out of personal experience, which is often the case for developer and infrastructure tools.
That’s exactly what Karri Saarinen did when ruminating on the idea for Linear. He and his co-founders, Jori Lallo and Tuomas Artman, hated the project management software they used for their jobs as product builders at fast-growing startups — Saarinen was a principal designer at Uber at the time. The founders suspected other engineers and product managers felt similarly, so they wanted to test this idea before quitting to work on the idea full-time.
“We were always the type of people that we wanted to build something for,” Saarinen says of himself, Lallo and Artman. “We weren’t in management positions — we were in high IC positions because we all loved building things. And it didn’t feel like the incumbent tool was helping ICs actually do the work, which is weird, because the productivity of any company comes from ICs like engineers and designers.”
Over the course of about a year, they ran admittedly light user research with their coworkers — they wanted to keep things casual. They were:
- ICs (not managers)
- Product builders (software developers, product managers and designers)
- Working at fast-growing startups (Airbnb, Uber and Coinbase)
Their approach to these conversations was informal. “It was pretty random and unstructured,” says Saarinen. They started by asking coworkers, along with other friends in the tech world, including some founders, these questions about their companies’ software dev project management tool of choice:
- What do you think is bad about this tool?
- How would you want to improve it?
- What would make you more productive?
Just about everyone had complaints, but Saarinen noticed that most folks assumed this wasn’t a problem that could be solved. “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.”
One of the biggest grievances that surfaced during these conversations was how slow the performance of tools were. “So that made us think, what if we can solve the speed issue? What if we can build a tool that’s never slow?” he says. So the founding team was determined to design a tool with deep functionality from the outset — that was also incredibly fast.
Saarinen now credits much of their early conviction in Linear to this pre-work they did before quitting to work on Linear full-time.
Don’t pitch your friends
Ryan Glasgow did almost the exact opposite from the Linear co-founders. The Sprig co-founder and CEO thinks the best way to validate an idea is to completely remove social pressure from the equation. When he was validating the idea for the surveying and product research tool, he built some lightweight mockups — and pitched them to strangers.
“One of the key learnings I had early is to never involve people who you personally know in the customer development process. Folks reach out to their own audience for customer development, but I think it’s often misleading,” he says. “Instead, I started to cold email founders and PMs at Y Combinator companies. I had no relationship with them, and I wanted to see if they would respond to my emails, because if I'm truly solving a pain that they're experiencing, then they will spend time. And I was able to get several of them to respond and take meetings with me.”
Glasgow notes that this is particularly important for B2B endeavors. “Time is more valuable than money if you're selling to someone here, because it's the company's money, but it's their individual time. And they're often very busy with a lot of different priorities,” he says.
He shares an example of some early potential customers who were willing to sink in that time as design partners. He found a PM at Hotwire who spent over an hour each week over three months co-creating and providing feedback. Then there was the Intuit PM on the QuickBooks team who gave him tons of feedback on the mock-ups. “So I started to validate that people I don’t know in this product management segment at high-growth and at-scale companies were willing to spend time and provide feedback, because it resonated. It solved a problem that they were experiencing in their lives because the existing solutions for them were, in fact, broken,” he says.
In the very beginning, I really wanted to test and validate whether this was worth working on by seeing if people who I didn't know were willing to spend time with me to help co-create and develop this product.
Consult experts who can add scaffolding to your idea
Potential customers aren’t the only input to consider when evaluating whether or not to proceed to the build. When you’ve had dozens (if not hundreds) of customer conversations, it gets easy to fall into the trap of thinking too literally about what folks say they want.
No matter how jazzed your potential customers are by your idea, other what ifs remain: Is it feasible? Will there be too much competition? Will you enjoy building it?
Here’s how these founders tested their ideas with industry experts, investors and fellow founders.
Use industry insiders as a sounding board
Immad Akhund had been sitting on the idea for Mercury for several years while working on his previous startup and later during his stint as a YC partner.
“The online bank idea had been in my head for years. I was like, ‘Okay, let me just explore this,’ and the more I explored it, the more it turned from impossible to doable but hard. Doable but hard is like, 'I'm in.’”
A seasoned founder, Akhund eschewed the customer route to dive deep into the fintech industry. What he was really after was testing whether he could do what he considered the “hard part” — clearing the compliance and regulatory hurdles in this industry. He felt deep conviction that this was a sorely needed solution, but the lingering question was whether it was feasible. “Everyone knew I could build a product. I knew I could build a product. The hard bit was proving that I could get a bank sponsorship and figure out the framework for compliance and risk and legal and all these things,” he says.
“When you first explore an idea, you feel really stupid,” says Akhund. “Fintech is full of acronyms. People are like, ‘Oh, you need to worry about KYC.’ I'm like, ‘What is KYC?’”
To explore the idea — and test its feasibility — he sought out three types of fintech insiders:
- Founders: Entrepreneurs in the fintech space had navigated many of these same regulatory barriers that Akhund needed to clear. “Many founders I talked to were failed entrepreneurs, some were successful. So I wanted to see, if they failed at the idea, what failed? Where were the failure cases, and how long did it take to build it?” says Akhund. “Generally speaking with entrepreneurs, there are no bad questions or dumb questions. They're all like, ‘Hey, I was just like you. I was trying to figure this out.’ They’re super helpful people.”
- Investors: Investors have pattern recognition — they’ve seen what does and doesn’t work for fintech founders. “With investors, I was trying to figure out what was fundable. Investors tend to be really good connectors as well, so they connected me to other entrepreneurs,” says Akhund.
- Lawyers: Akhund turned to lawyers to get a deeper understanding of the legal complications he’d have to face. “Lawyers were probably the surprisingly most useful set of people,” he says. “Most lawyers will do a 30-minute call with you for free, and there are a lot of financial services lawyers out there. I wrote a list once and did 90 conversations like this. Often, some of the most useful ones were four intro chains down. I talked to someone, they'd introduce me to someone, they'd introduce me.”
At the start of a company, spend all your time doing the thing you’re least capable of doing and the least capable of proving to the world that you can do.
Talk to skeptics
WorkOS founder and CEO Michael Grinich went hunting for a startup idea nobody wanted to solve. So when he was met with several naysayers early on, he was thrilled.
He was inspired by YC co-founder Paul Graham, who wrote, “The best startup ideas seem at first like bad ideas … if a good idea were obviously good, someone else would already have done it.”
So Grinich suspected the greater the skepticism, the thornier the problem — and the more valuable the solution. “I wanted to find an area that, to everyone else, looked like a bad idea, but based on personal experience, I knew some secret as to why it was actually a good idea,” he says. “That’s the only effective place to look for startup ideas because otherwise you just don't have any special insight.”
The first company he co-founded, an email tool called Nylas, had struggled to crack the enterprise market. When he moved on from the company, he went on a so-called “entrepreneur version of Eat, Pray, Love,” to mull over his next venture, and kept a running list of any and all random or obscure ideas that crossed his mind.
Grinich eventually reviewed his list with more scrutiny, circling the ones that met this criteria: It was in a huge market, he had some experience in it, the timing was right, and crucially, it was an idea that looked bad to some people but good to him. “If you have something that looks like a good idea to enough people, you risk getting into a situation where, within six months, there's a ton of companies just like yours,” he says. “You don't want to be in that situation. You want to be the only product in the category when you launch, and around six months ahead of the competition. So look for the solution that looks like a bad idea to enough people initially.”
He landed on an idea that met that criteria: A developer tool to make enterprise-ready apps. He paused to spend some time building out his thinking around it.
He spent the next year and a half validating his idea by interviewing three key audiences, which included folks who had dealt with selling to enterprise, as well as a potential ICP of IT admins:
- Founders of software companies currently trying to cross over to enterprise. This included CTOs of companies he thought would eventually need enterprise features. His goal with this audience was to see how they were thinking about their enterprise roadmap. He asked questions like: 1) How would you feel about using an external service for this? 2) Would you trust it? 3) What would it take for you to depend on us? 4) Where are you in your lifecycle, and when would you be ready to adopt a solution?
- Companies that had successfully cracked the enterprise market. “These people essentially told me what the roadmap was because I hadn’t actually built enterprise stuff before.” He spoke to the enterprise product team at Dropbox (where he previously worked), Asana and Slack. Some of these people ended up becoming WorkOS' angel investors. For this group, he asked questions like: 1) How did you do it? 2) What was important? 3) What ended up not being important?
- IT admins. This audience was more challenging to get in front of, but Grinich discovered that many VCs have CIO networks, and that by simply reaching out to them and sharing that he was an entrepreneur building something for IT, they were willing to talk to him (as long as they didn’t feel like he was trying to sell them anything). “Very few people build cool software for IT people, so they're usually pretty excited to chat,” he says. This was a particularly important group because IT admins are the end user of WorkOS. Because he wasn’t familiar with this audience, Grinich’s goal was to build empathy by asking: 1) What are your concerns with enterprise software? 2) What do you care about with these products? 3) How do you think about security and compliance? 4) What's a showstopper feature versus just a nice-to-have?
From those early conversations, Grinich learned that software company founders were actually really turned off by the idea of enterprise. “Founders were like, ‘I don't want to do enterprise stuff. This sounds like it sucks. I want to stay away from this as much as possible.’”
That’s when knew he was onto something: No one thought this was a tool worth building.
But, he found that the problem he’d landed on was a real pain point for IT admins. “The people on the IT side were the most frustrated because they were the ones constantly having to say no to adopting new products and services that weren't enterprise-ready. They're the ones that are the final gatekeeper,” he says.
See if other founders have FOMO
After selling his first two companies, Bob Moore knew he wanted to take a bigger swing for his third venture. So he pulled out the running list of ideas he’d scribbled down over the past decade of entrepreneurship and circled the strongest 10. Then, he put them in front of other founders.
“Founders are special. They need to develop an extremely high level of empathy and understanding for the needs of people across multiple personas, and also understand a baseline grasp on how markets evolve over time and what makes for something that's more durable and versatile,” says Moore.
He knew fellow founders could expand his thinking around each idea in ways no one else could. “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,” says Moore. “I wasn't interested in having my next thing be anything other than an IPO-scale business — I wasn’t optimizing for a ‘build it for a few years and sell’ situation. I thought I had one more startup in me and I wanted to see how far I could take it.”
He made sure to set up a guard to fend off bias and empty responses. Founders tend to be default optimistic, able to see the potential in any idea. So without revealing which way he was leaning, he told each founder to choose which of the ideas they liked the best.
“I’d say, ‘Hey, I've got three business ideas. I like them all equally. I want to pitch you on them and see where it goes.’ I did around 20 or 30 of these calls with founders and I distributed the 10 ideas across all of them,” says Moore.
The idea for what would become Crossbeam quickly bubbled to the top. Moore knew it was a winner when founders started recommending who else he should talk to — essentially pointing him toward potential customers. The idea had a built-in viral loop.