Comments on: Friday Q&A: How to Validate Your Startup Idea

By: How We Validated 12 Online Courses Without Spending a Cent

How We Validated 12 Online Courses Without Spending a Cent — Thu, 07 Feb 2019 13:22:19 +0000

[…] a look at the validation process Alex Turnbull followed when he decided to launch Groove, a help-desk software with over 8,000 […]

By: Brandon Landis

Brandon Landis — Mon, 01 Feb 2016 08:07:36 +0000

Think everyone can benefit from doing the market research and then getting excited about the results, rather than getting to hyped about an idea first and trying to fit customer needs to your ideas.

By: Dennis Meng

Dennis Meng — Sat, 30 Jan 2016 00:07:53 +0000

Hey Alex,

IMO validating an idea is one of the hardest things for first-time entrepreneurs. Not because it’s hard to take the right steps, but because it’s hard to be honest with yourself about the feedback you’re getting. Although maybe that was just a problem I had 😉

Thanks for sharing your validation process.

By: Ryan Angilly

Ryan Angilly — Fri, 29 Jan 2016 21:34:15 +0000

This is one of those posts that I think a lot of people with similar experience might think “meh that’s too obvious” before writing something like it. I’m glad you didn’t have that reaction. We did this exact same thing for https://ChartURL.com before deciding to flip it from “internal tool” to “full blown external product”: We built a deck and started to fish the idea around. We decided that unless we could get 5 commitments to pay for the product within 2 weeks, we weren’t going to build it. It paid off huge, but not for the reasons you think.

That was mid October. As of today, not a single one of the 6 “commitments” (we got an extra one) is using ChartURL, much less paying for it. However, the exercise was still tremendously valuable because it helped us flush out details of the product that we otherwise might have missed. Forcing them to make a “commitment” encouraged them to expose any caveats, and those caveats had a huge influence on the resulting product.

I’m not upset at all that none of those “commitments” are paying yet. We’ve doubled every month since launching, and I think it’s very much because the feedback we got from that exercise resulted in an extremely simple, straightforward product.

By: Cory Bray

Cory Bray — Fri, 29 Jan 2016 17:58:01 +0000

At CareerSofia, we’re following the Customer Development methodology popularized by Steve Blank. His books – The Four Steps to the Epiphany and The Startup Owner’s Manual – are pure gold. One of Blank’s students, Eric Ries, wrote The Lean Startup, which is great as well.

I’ve never led the product side of a business before. When I asked my product mentors for advice, they all said to follow Steve Blank.

By: James McBryan

James McBryan — Fri, 29 Jan 2016 16:49:21 +0000

With my current business, I have a very hard time finding that congregation point. At the very best I can find groups that might have 1 in 50 who is the right fit. This is probably the problem with choosing a niche market.. So I’ve been left to casting a net with seo and hunting with Google searches and cold emails, but I’m always hungry to do better!

What tactics do you recommend to reach your market if your market doesn’t congregate?