Enjoyed reading it, and also your writing style in general. Am saving the article in order to refer to when I start developing my new product idea. I have a genuine question, and maybe two further "optional" comments to offer since you're explicitly soliciting feedback.
The question: is there a distinction to be made between "startup" and "product"? How, if at all, would you change your process for a simple product idea, like, say, a new kind of umbrella?
As for the optional comments, I did find the "Read a book" a bit jarring in the bulleted steps of the process -- it is unlike the other steps in that you don't do it again and again for every single startup idea you might be evaluating, and so not really part of a process associated with each project.
The difference between startup and product is simple, and it's something I'm guilty of conflating (along with many others). The product is what you're selling, and the startup is the organisation built around it to bring it to market. I should really have used the word Product instead of Startup.
Thanks for the thoughts around the Read A Book bullet point. Yes, I think it could do with being re-written!
These are definitely some validate starting points. I recommend giving some sort of chronological order to the process. With emphasis on spending quality time up front defining what problem space you are attempting to solve. Once that is defined, you might have a more clear idea about your potential target customer. From there you could actually build better traits about your customer. This process is typically known as building personas. This part of the process is helpful and helps you and your team focus on what are the real themes/problems needing to be solved.
I do agree that reading definitely helps but one book isn't enough. There are several books in this space that are helpful but probably deserve their own thread. Especially around strategy. Maybe worth building out a collective comprehensive recommendations list one day.
Surveys are great but wont capture the true understanding of your customer or the heavy user of what ever product you create. One needs spend some quality time (1hr initially) with these customers so you can build out a better persona which will help you hone and focus on creating the right solution. Then you can use future surveys after gaining trust to get valuable feedback. I do however understand this is a "fill the top of the funnel" approach which isn't bad.
However that said you make some really great points throughout your posting about falling in love with the problem which will allow you to create a great solution.
Yes, agreed that there's much more that can be done, but this is attempting to put a basic framework around the very early stages of validation (which should obviously be an ongoing process, anyway).
It's frustrating because obviously stuff like persona building should be in there, but at some point if you include everything it becomes too unwieldy to be a simplistic, quick process. I'd love to get to a point where this is both simple AND comprehensive. But I expect that's a bit of a holy grail.
The question: is there a distinction to be made between "startup" and "product"? How, if at all, would you change your process for a simple product idea, like, say, a new kind of umbrella?
As for the optional comments, I did find the "Read a book" a bit jarring in the bulleted steps of the process -- it is unlike the other steps in that you don't do it again and again for every single startup idea you might be evaluating, and so not really part of a process associated with each project.