How to validate ideas posted by IndieFounder

You might be wondering how to validate ideas posted on IndieFounder.co. Here’s a helpful guide to walk you through the process.

Does the idea suit your founder context?

When evaluating an idea from IndieFounder, think about how it resonates with who you are. Does it align with your values and interests? Does it excite you? If so, why?

Things to consider when thinking about your founder context:

• Would you be excited waking up every morning for the next 5 years working on this idea? That’s the kind of drive you need.

• Does the market size and the potential outcome resonate with your goals?

• Do you have an unfair advantage when it comes to this idea? Maybe it's industry connections, unique skills, or an existing audience that is a perfect fit for the idea. Or maybe you have already built this technology before which gives you a head start.

• Don’t trust our analysis (or anyone’s). You’ll need to do your own deep digging into the market surrounding the idea to fully understand if it can support your long term vision.

Are you simpatico with the target market?

It's easier to sell to a crowd when you understand it well. Are you a veteran of the industry the idea relates to? Maybe you frequent the same communities or forums that potential customers frequent.

• If you're launching a tool for digital nomads and you are one, then you're on the right track. If not, you’ll need to do a dive deep into their world to learn to speak their language and use idioms they use in your outreach.

• Do you know where the target market hangs out online? These communities are a great place to start your validation efforts.

• Your audience can smell inauthenticity from a mile away. Make sure you truly understand their needs, pain points, and aspirations.

Can you sell it to the target market? (The real question)

The general consensus regarding idea validation is to answer one simple question… “Will people pay?” Of course, this is a great place to start, but it misses a very important point… Even if people will pay, the more important question is “Can YOU sell it to that market?”

For example, it’s pretty obvious Lamborghinis will sell, but there are many people out there who would not be very good at selling them! This simple idea is true for every market.

The key point here is to check assumptions and make sure there is a path to sales!

The nitty-gritty on how to validate an idea from IndieFounder

Of course, every validation journey is unique so it would be impossible to outline all cases, but in the main these are the broad strokes that can help you validate an idea.

1. Before you do anything else, speak to people in your target market. But please do keep in mind, due to people’s inbuilt politeness, they will most likely tell you the idea is great – which can provide false positives.

2. The one true way you can quickly know if you can work an idea is if people you speak to are chomping at the bit to give you money and turn the idea into reality as quickly as possible. In fact, the entire business of KickStarter is built on this premise.

3. As fantastic as it is to get instant validation with the “take my money” response, usually everything is more nuanced. As mentioned above, people may tell you they want the product, simply to be polite. To get around that problem we recommend that you read “The Mom Test” which is a book that can help you get past people’s politeness radar.

4. After you’ve got some kind of buy-in on the idea itself, you can mock it up using some kind of wire-framing or mockup software and show it to the same folks you previously spoke to. In some cases you may want to do your mockups before you speak to anyone, but in general we recommend you speak to people first, then circle back to with a mockup.

5. If the mockup is totally different to what the customer imagined, you can iterate it. No need to spend too many cycles on this part. The 80/20 rule applies here. It’s impossible to please everyone but when you have something that most of your customers like then it’s go time.

6. The perfect scenario is to get a check from customers pre-paying for some amount of time, before you build anything. Next best is to get a verbal commitment from people you feel are being genuine about wanting to purchase the product.

7. Another common way to get commitment is by creating a mock sales page and sending traffic to it and see if anyone clicks the buy button.

8. During your customer interviews you may discover that no one wanted the original idea you pitched, but, they were all crazy about an idea that was a tweak of the original.

Further reading

Vetting a startup (or two): The systematic birth of @WPEngine