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One theme across most of those stories is that the author and his team went out and built something before validating their ideas. Actually building a product i
by cnorgate 15y ago
One theme across most of those stories is that the author and his team went out and built something before validating their ideas. Actually building a product is perhaps the HEAVIEST way to validate whether there's a market for the idea. Spend more time upfront validating the idea... make a fake version of the product, create some landing page that people can sign up for... anything to avoid going out and building before you know you're on to something.
It's okay to mess around with products in your spare time if it's just 'tinkering', but if you're trying to do the startup game for real, then lower investment upfront in ideas is critical to finding one that works.
- danhodgins 15y agoI have heard many moderately and wildly successful entrepreneurs and marketers including Seth Godin, Tim Ferris, Steve Blank, and Eric Ries all mention some variation of "prove your market first by prototyping your solution and getting feedback from the market BEFORE writing a single line of code". The market validation process is relatively obvious and straightforward to execute, but it's STILL hard to build a successful business around a compelling solution for a validated market.
- dlevine 15y agoThis has been another big learning. Basically, it's super-important to validate your ideas before you start building. I have trended towards doing more and more customer validation as things have gone along.