8 Data-Driven Ways To Validate Your Startup Idea
Too many entrepreneurs think the best way to determine the quality of an idea — be it a company, a product, a feature, whatever — is by asking people their opinions. WRONG! Asking people their opinions is the worst way to validate (or invalidate) an idea for three important reasons.
Reason #1: People usually don’t know what they want, particularly in an entrepreneurial context. To expect them to hear your idea and instantly recognize it as something they’d want is, at best, naive, and at worst, unbelievably narcissistic. For example, if the founders of AirBnB had asked you whether or not you thought renting an air mattress in someone’s living room was a good idea in 2008 when it first launched, what would you have said?
Reason #2: People Lie. I don’t mean they lie maliciously (though, of course, they do that, too). In this case, I mean people don’t like hurting other people’s feelings, particularly when they already know you or you’re talking with them in-person. As a result, an online poll you share on Facebook that only reaches people in your network is useless, and any face-to-face interviews you conduct — even with strangers on the street — aren’t going to give you a valid dataset.
Reason #3: Entrepreneurs can’t avoid asking leading questions. When entrepreneurs ask whether an idea is good or not, they do…
