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How to validate your startup idea quickly
61–70 of 80 posts
Re: How to validate your startup idea quickly
#62A number of the comments are saying this is bad because from Facebook, numbers are unrealistic ($100mm?!), signs tell you nothing. Personally, I've done startups longer than I want to admit (10+ yrs). If I was to start another one, the play book would look basically like this article. Idea/Thesis, Hypothesis, Target, Test and some where later - build. The problem I had when I started and why so many founders get it w…
Idea/Thesis, Hypothesis, Target, Test and some where later - build. This is a common strategy if you just want to 'do a startup' but it misses the need . Every successful business I can think of started with a founder needing a product to exist. All the startups I've been involved in have been products I wanted to exist because I needed them myself, or I had a close relationship with someone who needed them. Turning…
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Re: How to validate your startup idea quickly
#63The last step where you manually do what the product is meant to do really works in 1% of products. Think of all the successful products today: Docusign, Snowflake, Wix, yeah.. not going to happen. It’s 2020. All the low hanging fruit ideas are gone. Any meaningful product idea requires a bit more complexity in implementing it.
I know several people who would pay good money to have lengthy and repetitive forms (school permission slips for field trips) filled in 'automatically' and doing this manually should be a cinch! So I'm not sure I agree with your hypothesis.
Really? Paying for someone to fill in forms? If it’s trivial like a field trip, I don’t see anyone paying for that. If it’s important like a legal document, you dont want someone to fill it in for you.
Re: How to validate your startup idea quickly
#64Maybe it is because I'm older, but whenever I see this advice to build a fake landing page and see if people sign up... I recall that selling vaporware was reviled in the 90s, but somehow now it is considered a wise business tool. It still feels scammy to me. If you have a market in mind, but don't have people in that market to talk to directly to validate your idea, you are aiming at the wrong market. Otherwise all these techniques prove is that you can collect emails, not that those emails will actually become paying customers.
Re: How to validate your startup idea quickly
#65If the author ends a statement with a question mark, I find it very hard to take them seriously. How can they be insightful but not thorough enough to check a title? Does that make me a bad person? I mean just that, on its own?
On the contrary, I have come through some articles / blogs that have delivered insightful answers to the question that led you to it in the first place. Doesn't make you a bad person, but you should definitely clean your judgmental glasses.
Re: How to validate your startup idea quickly
#66A number of the comments are saying this is bad because from Facebook, numbers are unrealistic ($100mm?!), signs tell you nothing. Personally, I've done startups longer than I want to admit (10+ yrs). If I was to start another one, the play book would look basically like this article. Idea/Thesis, Hypothesis, Target, Test and some where later - build. The problem I had when I started and why so many founders get it w…
Idea/Thesis, Hypothesis, Target, Test and some where later - build. This is a common strategy if you just want to 'do a startup' but it misses the need . Every successful business I can think of started with a founder needing a product to exist. All the startups I've been involved in have been products I wanted to exist because I needed them myself, or I had a close relationship with someone who needed them. Turning…
I'd caveat this with the note that many unicorns, including a couple I've worked with, didn't solve any problem that a solution wasn't available for - they instead solved it better/more cheaply or in a new way. This is especially true in the B2B SaaS market where any large addressable market likely has incumbents you'll be fighting against, even if only tangentially.
Re: How to validate your startup idea quickly
#67Maybe it is because I'm older, but whenever I see this advice to build a fake landing page and see if people sign up... I recall that selling vaporware was reviled in the 90s, but somehow now it is considered a wise business tool. It still feels scammy to me. If you have a market in mind, but don't have people in that market to talk to directly to validate your idea, you are aiming at the wrong market. Otherwise all…
You're not alone. This has always felt scammy. It's a little more gray-area than some of the traditional vapor-ware which was more about driving competition out of business by large players, but still something I try to avoid.
Re: How to validate your startup idea quickly
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not that the author is affiliated with facebook. The point is that for most startups, you validate your ideas from your kitchen table, fighting to get a handful of visitors to visit your site. When facebook launches a product at blasts an infinite firehose of users at the product. So the facebook experience is utterly different to the startup experience and really its kind of absurd to be sitting in facebook adv…
From my experience, the FB brand will get you user entering the door. I agree that's an advantage. But the FB brand does not get your app Product Market Fit. Those people who entered the door because of the ads $ spent, leave and then don't come back.
Being inside FB (or any other large company) has way more advantages than users entering the door.
Just the metrics and analytics that FB can gather on experiments is an insanely huge hill a regular startup can't climb. FB can gather and analise data at a scale, on so many markets and devices and demographics that none other plan tier at 3rd party integrations can hope to match. The SRE support you get, a 30 minute conversation with other great product managers, engineers, designers one meeting invite away, a history of what others have tried and what worked and what didn't, and so much more.
And if you get a VP to support you, even for a bit, we're basically talking about a torrent of money and resources being thrown at your project while you still drawn a 6 figure salary (plus benefits and bonus and stocks!). It's really apples to oranges here.
Re: How to validate your startup idea quickly
#69As someone else here asked:
What happens when you're building an improved version of something that already exist?
I am currently building an android app that already a lot of competition.
Some of these competitors have in-app purchases and some have a separate paid app version .
so the product idea itself is essentially validated - a nice chunk of people are willing to pay for it.
Re: How to validate your startup idea quickly
#70Maybe it is because I'm older, but whenever I see this advice to build a fake landing page and see if people sign up... I recall that selling vaporware was reviled in the 90s, but somehow now it is considered a wise business tool. It still feels scammy to me. If you have a market in mind, but don't have people in that market to talk to directly to validate your idea, you are aiming at the wrong market. Otherwise all…
You're not alone. This has always felt scammy. It's a little more gray-area than some of the traditional vapor-ware which was more about driving competition out of business by large players, but still something I try to avoid.
I'm older too. Maybe the issue is if the central premise is vapourware or components/add-on features So maybe if the author automated the metadata collection, ran some filtering on it and then had a fitness pro sanity check the results? I agree that this oft-recommended "idea validation" process sounds a lot like this scene from Silicon Valley, without the clarification at the end: