u/Sareer0

Founder here
spent a few weeks going through postmortems of failed SaaS products
the cause of death was almost always the same
not bad code
not bad design
not bad marketing
they built something before confirming anyone actually wanted it
the founder had a hypothesis and treated it like a fact
the scary part is how rational it felt to them at the time
"i have this problem so others must too"
"i got positive feedback from friends"
"there's no competition so the market is wide open"
all of these feel like validation
none of them are
real validation is finding strangers who are already suffering through a bad solution
not friends who say "yeah that sounds useful"
what's the closest thing to real validation you've seen work before building?

Founder here
spent a few weeks going through postmortems of failed SaaS products
the cause of death was almost always the same
not bad code
not bad design
not bad marketing
they built something before confirming anyone actually wanted it
the founder had a hypothesis and treated it like a fact
the scary part is how rational it felt to them at the time
"i have this problem so others must too"
"i got positive feedback from friends"
"there's no competition so the market is wide open"
all of these feel like validation
none of them are
real validation is finding strangers who are already suffering through a bad solution
not friends who say "yeah that sounds useful"
what's the closest thing to real validation you've seen work before building?