Validating Startup Ideas

customer discovery should probable come first. before you waste time building something talk to some people and see if they would pay for it. then, completely ignore everyone's advice and build it anyway. ;)

Even before building the product, I would suggest you validate that the idea is good in the first place. You can do that without creating any product at all and without depending on anyone else. It takes nothing more than creating a signup page and setting up adwords & analytics account. Look into this HN post - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3167676 and many other blog posts out there. Once you have validated that

My 2 cents... generally a product is something that has value to others... so, think about that first. Why is your product valuable to others? Explain your product to at least one person who is not invested in the process that would buy your product if it existed. Ask them lots of questions about why they would buy your product. Would their friends buy your product? Why? Can you pre-sell your product before you even start building it? You get the idea... sell first, build after. Sell a little, b

Let me give you my method, it might help. Don't go head first full bore into an idea at first. Build a quick, cheap prototype with only the main features and see how your target customer responds. Gives you a ton of feedback while validating or invalidating your idea without wasting a huge amounts of time. You might find that you need to pivot your idea or target a different group. So don't waste time and money on an idea before you prove the underlying assumptions.

the first thing you should do is talk to customers, or potential customers. don't make the mistake of building something people don't want. I know your currently thinking: "this is a product people will definitely want because of X,Y,Z". But, you really need to test those assumptions. You'd be surprised how people might react.

Try talking to potential clients before you start building the product. Client confirmation is the best motive by far. The reason we abandon projects is because at some point reality hits us in the face and we realize that the product might flop. If you know beforehand that there is demand for it you have all the reasoning you need to keep going.

Cool idea, but ultimately it doesn't matter what I or anyone else thinks of your idea, it's about your customer. I'd say don't build a product but instead build a landing page with the 'product' for sale (get some design mock ups done) then try and sell it and see what happens. This is similar to what the article says about talking to users but instead bypasses any mistakes you might make and getting false positives. If people buy that's a great indication ther

Talk to people, ASAP. Hone an elevator pitch, go to a coffee shop, and pitch strangers the idea in exchange for buying them a cup of coffee.Tell them it's your "crazy cousin's" idea, and that you don't think he should quit his full time job for it, but you wanted to see what other people thought of it before you got back to him. (This will make it so that they'll be more honest with you. If they know it's your idea...they'll feel bad telling you it sucks).Are people giving you their busine

Would recommend you check out "The entrepreneurs guide to customer development"!Customer Development is a process that's really meant to be applied to prospective customers. The whole point is to figure out what problems the market needs, and ultimately what kind of solutions there might actually be a market for.Instead of building something and then going to people and asking if it's useful, find out what a large segment of the market would find useful first.Get ou

A common misconception among devs is that the product must exist in order to test if people will pay for the product. This usually causes the dev to never bring something to market because deciding when something is minimally ready is hard. Instead, consider:Step 1 - spend time finding people who will pay you instead of building something speculativeStep 2 - you are now a business person, congratulationsPerhaps a few steps in between step 1 and 2 might be to understand market size, grow