4 ms·

Regarding "which best describes how you validated your original business idea?", is anyone aware of more research around the effectiveness or practicality of di

by shoo 6y ago

Regarding "which best describes how you validated your original business idea?", is anyone aware of more research around the effectiveness or practicality of different validation approaches? That is, rough false-positive (validation indicated that business idea had sufficient market demand when it didn't) and false-negative rates (validation indicated that business idea had insufficient market demand when it did) for different validation approaches. Naively it'd be great to have data of the form "given our idea for a business was bad specifically because there would be insufficient market demand, when we validated the idea by method A (e.g. getting verbal commitment from n potential customers), validation result indicated there was enough market demand to proceed, we decided to proceed, but the business failed later specifically for a reason that the validation approach was intended to measure (customers willing to buy the service) and not for some other reason". I.e. known ground-truth, measurement, measurement result, decision to proceed or abort based on measurement result, actual outcome. Probably would be a very tricky thing to isolate the effectiveness of the validation approach and tease it apart from other confounding factors.

johnsmith4739 6y ago
Co-founder, 3rd startup, helped a handful of others grow. I meekly suggest a different framing or mindset. It is less "this idea is good or bad / market demanded it or not" - which suggests a passive, fixed worldview - I propose a more proactive approach: "am I able to make people adopt our solution or not." If you launch something innovative (i.e. not 1-1 comparable with existing alternatives) your effective market is 0. This applies even more if you create a new category. So you can be faced with the situation where market demand cannot be satisfied unless you know how to reshape its adoption dynamics. In this case, validation has multiple pieces that have to come together: is there compensatory behaviour to prove that existing solutions are underdelivering; can we identify an early adopter psychographic looking for a specific feature set we're able to create; do we have a way to get to them;

by shoo 6y ago

johnsmith4739 6y ago

Co-founder, 3rd startup, helped a handful of others grow. I meekly suggest a different framing or mindset. It is less "this idea is good or bad / market demanded it or not" - which suggests a passive, fixed worldview - I propose a more proactive approach: "am I able to make people adopt our solution or not." If you launch something innovative (i.e. not 1-1 comparable with existing alternatives) your effective market is 0. This applies even more if you create a new category. So you can be faced with the situation where market demand cannot be satisfied unless you know how to reshape its adoption dynamics. In this case, validation has multiple pieces that have to come together: is there compensatory behaviour to prove that existing solutions are underdelivering; can we identify an early adopter psychographic looking for a specific feature set we're able to create; do we have a way to get to them;