Startup Tip #2: Validation is Key

Avoiding the number one cause of startup failure

Photo by Pixabay from Pexels

This is the 2nd in a series of startup tip posts. Read the first one here. All will be short, and I’m hoping other founders and future founders will find some or all of them helpful.

I cannot stress this one enough. If you don’t go out and validate ASAP, you are wasting time. The number one reason that startups fail is lack of market need. So go out there and talk to people.

But before you do that, you should probably know what you are validating. A common mistake is to ask people what they think of your solution. That’s bad for 2 reasons.

1. Most people aren’t going to tell you to your face that an idea is bad.
2. The solution isn’t what you need to be validating.

Your discussions can show that your solution is the coolest, most amazing thing ever, but that doesn’t matter if nobody actually needs it. You need to validate the problem before the solution.

So how do you do that? The answer is customer interviews (see also problem interviews and user interviews). I’ll get into some of the specifics in later posts. For now, these articles cover it nicely.

• How to do problem interviews
• 100 questions you can ask in development interviews
• All the resources you need customer interviews
• How to do customer interview - problem interviews

If there are particular parts of startup life you want me to focus these tips on, drop a comment.