How did you validate the need for your startup product?

I think another really good question is WHEN did you validate the need for your startup product. As a venture builder at a startup studio, I see many startup founders spend months working on an MVP only to start validation too late (made this mistake myself as well). Some products do not need an MVP at the early validation stages.

I had an idea, quickly created an MVP seeking feedback on the idea. It was very well received and had a good number of users. Now I just launched the second version of it.

write good sales letter, make one image and share stripe link! I built $22,000 B2B community in 1months in this way. No survey. no paid ad. Oh and I am building a virtual office tool for remote team's happiness. Would love to chat what you are building now!!

To validate your startup idea, i.e determine whether it's worth expending your precious and scarce Founder Energy on, answer these four essential questions: Is it pitch-worthy? Is it join-worthy? Is it earn-worthy? Is it prepay-worthy? A startup is a machine that turns Founder Energy into Cashflow from the sale of a tech-powered solution. The goal in validating a startup idea is to find out fast if the idea is a good use of your Founder Energy. Building an MVP or chasing VCs before you pass your startup through these four gates is failure mode and will resign you to the 90%+ of failed founder/startup/VC bets. Passing your idea through these four gates will lead to startup success because you will know that your idea is attractive to a community willing to exert some effort to get access to it, either by earning access or paying for it. If you can convert your Founder Energy into cashflow at the idea stage, then congratulations! You have a startup worth pursuing. If you can't, then just start again with the first gate, either improving your pitch for your idea or starting the validation process with another idea. I built Slyk to make it easy to validate the answers to all four questions before you reserve yet another domain for a startup idea (or start looking for a co-founder, hiring a dev shop, or working on a VC pitchdeck). Don't waste your Founder Energy building MVPs no one will use or chasing VCs who don't want to talk until you've validated your Startup idea!

I think talking to industry experts and product wizards that has made innovative products before is the way to go. Interviews and surveys are often biased and more often than not gives false positives. Apple never does interviews or surveys for instance.

I put up an auto-based professional services ad-campaign online. Luckily we got a few sales calls. We're still getting them now from the Google Maps SEO

If you have the resources to create a working prototype or even better, an MVP; I believe there isn't a better alternative

Ours was a bit straightforward. When we started building Wylo - a community platform, we already had some players in the market. This was itself proof that there exists a need. To add on, we explored the current platforms, talked with some users, and understood the nuances of what can be made better and why there needs to be another community platform to fulfill the unmet needs.

For me, the first crypto startup I started in 2018 was a content business, because we saw the need and we personally needed something like that. For my new startup OpenTools.ai I faced the same problem and then I approached all my entrepreneur's buddies and they said the same. It's always the problem you faced, so you know more than normal market research.

Worked on particularly two things. MVP and Feedback Look. We built the MVP pretty fast for our flagship product. Which was academy to teach nocode technology. Focused on Bubble. We iterated over 6 months and gained more and more info on how the customer wanted to learn Nocode tech. Helped us gain a lot of traction. Now focused on taking it to the next level.