The Importance of Validating Your Startup Idea
Stop wasting time and money on ideas that the market doesn’t want
You’ve heard it before — the Lean startup method, the importance of a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), “failing fast”, etc. — the startup world has hammered into us the importance of releasing a product into the market quickly to test it. But this point is so critical that I think it’s worth repeating.
Having started a company myself and through working with other entrepreneurs, time and time again I see people make this mistake. We have an idea, we get excited and personally invested, and the next thing you know you’re hundreds of hours deep before you’ve tested the market need. In fact, in a post-mortem of over 1000 startups, CB insights found that the number one cause of startup failure was “no market need”.
So, how is it that even though we know we need to test the market, we fail to adequately do so?
Are you building a pill or a vitamin?
I believe that one of the reasons many startups fail is because they are building vitamins instead of pills. What I mean by that is your product may solve a real problem, but that is not the same thing as a product that people want. Too often, we substitute solving a problem for actually validating customer interest.
It’s partly because validating customer interest is hard. That’s the honest truth. It is hard to know if people will actually use your product, if people will be able to find your product, and even further, if people will be willing to pay for your product.
The key to truly validating your startup idea before investing too much personal time and money — or a VC’s money — is to understand the purpose and form of an MVP.
How to build a true MVP
If the majority of startups fail because of “no market need”, then the number one purpose of an MVP is to gauge market interest before significant investment. Feedback on functionality, features, and user experience is a secondary benefit of the MVP model. You need to focus on releasing a basic MVP quickly and then constantly assessing market interest and willingness to pay at each continual improvement.
This does not mean releasing a product that is full of bugs. It is simply, at each stage, the most basic model that can test your assumptions about market need. It could be a mockup to show to potential users or a landing page that ties into Airtable. It could be a manual product or service that you figure out how to scale later. It could be an app with only the bare features, but that is still easy to use.
If you or your startup are spending tons of time debating which features to include or exclude in the MVP, you’re doing it wrong.
If you build a product before talking to end users or customers, you’re doing it wrong.
If you build one MVP, decide it works, and then lock your team in a room for a year to build the full product, you’re doing it wrong.
Stop wasting time and money on ideas that will never work. Test your market from the earliest possible stage, and continue to test as you build. As a passionate entrepreneur, you need to be able to moderate yourself before you invest too much in any idea. Only then will you strike upon the idea that the market really needs, and launch yourself into a successful startup.
