How to validate your startup idea

How to validate your startup idea

Lenny tackles reader questions about building product, driving growth, working with humans, and anything else that’s stressing you out about work. Here’s what you missed this month: Preparing for a PM interview and how to prepare for PM interviews.Subscribe to Lenny’s newsletter:

What traps should I look out for?

Asking the wrong questions

Quick tips

Find low-lift ways to validate your idea with mock product screenshots before starting to build

The biggest advice is simple

Look for an audience that is large but underserved, and take the time to understand their needs.

Final thoughts

The early journey as a founder really comes down to a few steps

If you want to learn, you can’t lose

If you’re doing it for the money, it’s not worth it

In the beginning, LaunchDarkly only had one paying customer a month.

They raised a seed round in 2015 but struggled to put together a Series A because VCs doubted that the market was big enough and that developers would pay for it

Quick tips:

Create a structured way to assess your ideas

Finding traction

The Cocoon team began by designing a UI flow in Figma, which they shared with the employees and employers they’d previously interviewed.

What advice would you give a founder just starting out?

Explore user-generated content (UGC)

If you can’t raise venture capital, don’t do a startup

Pick something you can do, get started, and try to get traction before raising

Advice for a Newbie

Flexport joined Y Combinator, partnered with First Round, and earned $2M in revenue eight years ago. Today, the company is on track to do $5B in revenue this year and is the fourth-largest U.S. freight forwarder by volume operating on the world’s largest trade lane, the trans-Pacific eastbound.

Emotions are high early on in the founder journey

You can go from feeling on top of the world in the morning to feeling at the end of the day like the company is going to die next week

Cacioppo started by interviewing founder friends and security leaders and asked them about the best and worst part of their days.

SOC 2-often the first way a company needs to prove its security competency-was a major pain point and, while security consultants offered expensive help, many people wanted an easier solution

Pinwheel is a payroll data connectivity platform building the income layer to power a fairer financial system

Kurtis Lin is the CEO and co-founder of Pinwheel

Start with an intuition about a better consumer experience and work your way to a winning idea

It takes a lot of conversations with consumers to pinpoint exactly where they’re experiencing pain, in and around the hunch that got you started.

Using Photoshop to create screenshots that looked like an app

Put them up on a website to see if people would sign up for this fake product

Celebrate wins

Take time to appreciate victories, however small, instead of always grinding on to the next step

Start with a problem you’re experiencing and figure out if other people or companies are experiencing it too

Founders who experienced a problem at one company sometimes leave to start their own business solving that problem for other companies.

If you can’t keep up with customer demands, you don’t have PMF

If you’re taking orders from internal management instead of external customers, you have it

Quick tips

Go in with an open mind

Quick tips

Build prototypes and test your early ideas on real customers

How to Pick an Idea and Validate It

Market first

How can I validate that it’s a good idea, and how will I know when an idea is promising enough to commit to?

Committing to a startup idea is possibly the most consequential decision you’ll ever make

Finding an idea

It’s OK to do things manually to get in front of customers and see if your idea works

Start with a market/space first and look for a problem

Talk to people in that space to understand their experience and challenges

Optimize relationships for the long term

Build toward a big idea by starting with a small step that’s more accessible and affordable to launch

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Quick tips:

Don’t rush into just starting a company-wait for the right thing to hit you personally, emotionally, and logically

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