u/ShipByNight

Validation – for a lot of people including myself – is like the warning text on a pack of cigarettes. You know full well smoking is bad for you, and you know full well you should validate your startup before writing code, but the smoking/building is just so appealing. Especially technical founders, they just can't help themselves.

The past decade I have been involved in multiple startups, and validation is always a pain. If I could build a startup to fix validation for founders, I would do it in a heartbeat, since – ironically – this validation thing is actually a real pain (just count the Reddit posts about this topic).

So I thought I would weigh in and tell how I have seen different startups handle validation.

I purposely don't go into too much detail about the software products, because firstly that's irrelevant for my point about validation, and secondly some of these companies are still going.

1st startup:

One of the co-founders spent 3 months cold calling companies, basically just interviewing people openly: can you tell me about your day, what do you do? And then asking follow up questions like: that sounds frustrating, can you elaborate? He switched markets twice but finally found a real repeated pain. This was of course a combination of idea extraction (drawing out problems people have without pitching your solution) and validation, but still. When the CTO started building the SaaS software, the first 10 client contracts were already signed. It was painstakingly slow, but well earned. Spoiler alert: I have never seen a better way than this.

2nd startup:

This was a spin-off of a bigger IT service company. Through their parent company they had acquired around 20 very large customers, customers a startup could only dream of (banks, insurance companies, etc). So validation was implied, right? Well, wrong, because on further study it turned out most of these clients were sleeping giants that barely used the SaaS software. Some clients we wouldn't even call, too afraid they would remember they had the subscription and then cancel. The clients I did speak to were not all that excited. The software was a checkbox, something that had to be done. Nothing more. No interaction, no ideas. The pain was really not that big, and later when more commodity products arrived, the startup didn't have an angle to compete.

3rd startup:

This one tackled a very specific compliance need in a niche market. The founders spoke to several potential clients, and they all agreed this compliance issue was 1) a legal obligation to handle and 2) there was no easy solution to handle it. So the founders thought that every client would need to use their software.

When the software was put into production a lot of clients signed up for the free trial, and although usage grew steadily, the growth rate was excruciatingly slow. When calling clients (also the first clients that validated the idea) it turned out that – even though legally obliged – most clients would just ignore the rules unless they were in a situation where ignoring it simply wasn't an option.

So even though the founders thought they had validated the pain, in fact the pain was really not that painful to clients, except in those high-stakes moments. Ouch.

4th startup:

I'm not even sure to call this a startup, because it's my own fun indiehacking project, but I did not validate anything at all. I just started building something because I liked to use it myself. This is of course the worst approach, but outreach doesn't come natural to me and I fell into the trap once more. So now - while I was gathering my thoughts for this post - I have decided I will not touch the code until I find at least one client so I can start validating and find a real use case for my product.

Conclusion

• Validation is hard (wow, no shit Sherlock) and I have only ever seen it work once, where a founder put in a lot of effort by just being on the phone for months.
• Big clients are not a validation by themselves. Paid usage is.
• Even when you think you have found a real pain, it may not be it. They may even think there is a pain, but once they need to pay the pain suddenly is not that painful anymore. So the most honest validation is when people pay for your product.
• Don't go indiehacking without validation, unless you just do it for fun and you have loads of time.

And just like with cigarettes, knowing all this probably won't stop you from building anyway. But at least now you can't say you didn't read the warning label.