Startup = 1% Ideation + 99% Validation
I’ve not been a successful tech entrepreneur. During my PhD I had hoped to commercialize my smartphone-based “tricorder” for infectious diseases. The technology works… adequately, and we had even patented it, but it never became more than a line on my CV.
It was also during my PhD that I had co-founded a startup developing a peanut allergy cleaning wipe. The technology works… sufficiently, and we’re just working out (hopefully) some final kinks before “beta testing” in the market, but again only time will tell if it goes anywhere.
So who am I to talk about startups? Having personally worked with 200+ startups as their advisor and mentor, I began to notice a trend: The ones that are prospering have a lot of this, and the ones that aren’t lack it in one way or another. Funding aside, this magical ingredient is validation.
This is something we spend a lot of time on in science and engineering: “You built a smartphone tricorder? Cool, now prove to me that it works.” I would even go so far as to say that only about 1% of the time spent on any given research project is focused on designing/building/conjuring up something new, while the remaining 99% is spent on tediously running experiments, collecting data, then generating and analyzing results. And hopefully at the end of it the results confirm your hypothesis, or that your design works as intended. If not, then rinse and repeat until it does.
It’s not the 1% of time spent on ideation, but the 99% of time spent on validation, which defines the research.
The same principle of validation apply in a startup:
- Technology Validation: “You made ___? Cool, now show me how it works.”
- Customer Validation: “You’re selling ___? Cool, now tell me why I should pay you money for it?”
- Business Validation: “You’re looking for an investment in your ___ business? Cool, now convince me why I should invest in this business, and not the 99 others before you?”
In essence, the process of validation is the process of affirming and demonstrating value. Without value, there is no business. So if you have an idea, start the validation process as early as you can by asking around — family, friends, contacts, strangers — to see if people see value in it. Because if there isn’t sufficient value to justify starting a startup, it’s better to find out sooner rather than later.
Similar to research, I would argue that it’s not the 1% of time spent on ideation, but the 99% of time spent on validation, which defines the startup.
