[zabana]

how would you go about validating an idea if you don't have at least a prototype to show potential customers ? This has been suggested to me on many occasions but I fail to understand how it works in practice. I'm not being sarcastic I'm genuinely interested because if this is possible it would save me a whole lot of time and headaches.

[Maro]

Depends on the idea, but there's a lot you can do before you write a single line code.

1. Of your friends/network, pick 5-10 people who could be potential customers. Ask them.

2. Think of a way to scrape emails addr of people who could be potential customers. Ask them.

3. Same on Linkedin.

4. Build a landing page, buy traffic from G and FB, look at time spent on your landing and CTRs to a signup page which then collects emails of interested parties ("We'll let you know once the Alpha is out").

5. Find a blog with potential customers, pay money to run some article on it that relates to your idea, with links to your landing page. Look at open rates of the article itself, and CTR to the landing, CTR on the landing, etc.

6. Create a public group on FB for people that could be potential customers. (Try to) create content for it, try to get people to join (maybe with ads).

All of these are highly noisy, but it's something. Also you could learn something unexpected, like: "oh, I get your idea, but we use already use X for that", and you didn't know about X, or you didn't know it could be used for that. This happened to me several times. Don't be overconfident in your Google-fu, it's a long tail world, and you may not be able to guess all the relevant keywords/marketing/angle that a competitor could be under.

[kjksf]

I second "Mom Test Book" (you can watch author's YouTube talks that cover the topic https://blog.kowalczyk.info/article/06817da6d15d429db3eec8f2...).

The thing is that most people think that idea validation is "Hey, this is my idea, what do you think?"

"Mom Test Book" describes a way to discover valid ideas by asking question, not asking question to validate ideas you had by yourself.

Still not easy by this point of view changed the way I think about it forever.

And now I can't help and see how everyone is doing it wrong i.e. instead of discovering ideas people would be willing to pay for, they have ideas and then look for validation (if that).

[kareemm]

I wrote an article about how we did this at my second company. It worked shockingly well:

https://www.reemer.com/articles/why-only-fools-write-code-fi...

[deltron3030]

If you're part of a community where people do things in a similar way, like a shared culture, you will discover pain points that aren't adressed by anyone, that you can solve for yourself, and if it works for you and you're not too exotic in the way you work (that's the side effect of a shared culture), chances are that it works for others as well.

So you validate it based on adressing your own pain points. The worst case scenario is that you were wrong about the exoticness of your workflow, or the actual size of your community and culture, and keep being the only user. But it's still not a failure if it helps you with your main work.

[streetcat1]

You cannot.

A "validated" idea is product that someone will pay their hard-earned money for.

Moreover, the true cost of buying a product, is the actual integration into the current workflows, internal processes changes, etc.

Since most people only change when they must, they will not buy a product even if they approve it and like it.

Hence, before the product is ready, what you getting is only opinions.

And, there is also a scale issue, since to get a statistically significant answer, you would need a large sample.

[bob33212]

You cannot get full validation until you have a product and have real people giving you real money for that product. But you can get some data points which have some correlation with future product market fit.

[mritchie712]

check out http://momtestbook.com/