9 ms·

How To Validate Your Business Idea By Testing A Hypothesis

150 points by alex_ka 12y ago

dsplatonov 12y ago
It's quite difficult to validate an idea, after FFF approved it and when you start development. In our startup we found it quite difficult to find the resources, where our target audience is located.
gchokov 12y ago
While I do see the value of validation, this is not a silver bullet. People try to simplify things, find patterns, but this cannot always work. There are so many reasons why I would not want to validate things: - Sometimes, people will not tell you what they want, because often they do not know what they want, until you show it to them. Someone smarter than me said this before. - People judge from their experience. You can have the perfect group to validate with.. but their experience will trick you. Building a product is an art. There way too many things one should consider based on his experience and intelligence, not everything can be quantified and calculated (well, it can be, but still with assumptions, and once you assume...). As one of my favorite photographers says, "There are no rules for good photographs, there are just good photographs". Same can be said when building a product..
- YL108 12y ago
  You are also right! I think if you've build several products before it's more easy to choose the right path building great products. But I do also see a lot of people just building something behind closed doors without thinking about the problem they really want to solve. Of course, justyo.co for example... I don't think there was a huge need in sending YO's :D
  - gchokov 12y ago
    Yes, when you've built several products, you definitely start to see things that work and things that do not work and you gain experience. Again, I am not against validation, it just should be used moderately and not exclusively as a key indicator if you should build something or not. Products like justyo.co popup once in a while and due to some pretty random events at some point they become a hype. I tend to think the creators are having a lot of fun as well, without really thinking for monetization that much.
- vdaniuk 12y ago
  "There are no rules for good photographs, there are just good photographs". I disagree with this and think that it is a self-defeating, irrational attitude. Sure, validation is not a silver bullet. However, lots of startups make it or break due to luck and no-one(yet) can't eliminate randomness in a stochastic(debatable) system like technology entrepreneurship ecosystem. Validation helps to decrease the chance of failing, though. The famous quote by George Box reads "Remember that all models are wrong; the practical question is how wrong do they have to be to not be useful." Also validation is not listening to what people tell, it's also observing actions of users when they interact with the MVP.
  - gchokov 12y ago
    It's funny that I mentioned randomness in my second comment as well :) I tend to agree with you to some extent, even about the quote for the comment. But, startups as an example fails to me, because as we all know, most of the startups fail anyway. p.s. there are rules for good photographs but following the rules can only put you on bar with other people. Learns the rules so that you can break them. Learn to validate so that you know when NOT to validate.
    - vdaniuk 12y ago
      Hm, I have an interesting thought. If "rules" is a consensus about best practices it is a standard model of the particular domain. Conditions of narrative manipulation and tragedy of the commons apply. With that in mind, one should break the rules only if they have a high degree of confidence in their ability to discover a model that is better than standard model or understanding that the entire modelling approach is tainted. However, Dunning-Kruger effect hypothesis states that less competent are irrationally sure of themselves and vice versa. Are we in a situation where most actors on the market are trying to break the rules to their own detriment?
  - dunmalg 12y ago
    >"There are no rules for good photographs, there are just good photographs". I disagree with this and think that it is a self-defeating, irrational attitude. Yeah, I think he's misinterpreting what his photographer friend means. There are TONS of rules for good photographs, everything from technical ("sufficient lighting") all the way up to art theory ("rule of thirds"). The guy's point was probably that any subject, at any time, can possibly be photographed in a way the conforms to the requirements of an artistically pleasing image. Trying to fit that notion to the idea that entrepreneurs should just leap for the stars without checking to see if their figurative lens cap is off is not really very sound.
- noonespecial 12y ago
  >"There are no rules for good photographs, there are just good photographs". There are also lots and lots (and more lots) of bad photographs. There might not be specific rules for taking really stand-out pictures, but there sure are good rules for what not to do.
  - aeden 12y ago
    Photographers take many more bad photos than good ones. Entrepreneurs fail more often than they succeed. We just tend to avoid showing bad photos and talking about failed businesses in public.
  - kisielk 12y ago
    And yet a lot of times the best photographs are the ones that break the rules of what not to do...
    - zacharycohn 12y ago
      On purpose. Bad photographers break rules they don't know exist. Good photographers break rules on purpose, in very specific ways, to achieve a very specific effect.
- wpietri 12y ago
  It sounds to me like you haven't had much practice validating things. Nobody serious about this sort of validation would suggest you ask people what they want. Instead, when you think you know what people really want, it's your job to prove that. Suppose that you make something that you're convinced is the best product in the world. You work for years, you spend millions. And then you launch. It turns out that nobody cares; you go bankrupt. Someone might ask: "Was it really a great product?" We could argue the answer to that, but I think it's the wrong question. Businesses need to be sustainable. Some ideas work, some don't. I think the best thing we can do is to a) maximize our chances of success, and b) minimize the cost of our failures. I believe the only way to do that is to continuously and aggressively test our hypotheses. Otherwise, investment just ends up being the way we fool ourselves a little longer. Products aren't art. They're commerce. If you want to do art, just do art.
- thenomad 12y ago
  There are lots and lots of rules for good visual composition, of which "good photographs" are a subset. Some people instinctively understand them. Some people have spent years painstakingly learning them, and now choose to break them from time to time. But there are plenty of rules, and if you're not already a genius or an expert, learning and following those rules is a reliable way to improve your photography.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
maninalift 12y ago
I usually skip the start-up advice posts on HN but this was worth reading for the first point along "focus on the problem not the solution". Good advice for hackers as well as entrepreneurs.
jlcummings 12y ago
Nitpicking, but removing "business" from the title would fit the article body a bit better. Questioning the viability of potential products and services is far different than evaluation of "business" modes or models. Good products will not save or propel a bad business, but good businesses can thrive on marginal and even terrible products.
poseid 12y ago
"After all, it took Thomas Edison hundreds of attempts before he invented the light bulb" -> It still not easy, people were used to candles at that time. Edison did not study the candle making process or the problems of people with candles. His genius was in putting together the solution. Apart from this, the article is nice indeed.
- joeyspn 12y ago
  > It still not easy, people were used to candles at that time. Edison did not study the candle making process or the problems of people with candles. His genius was in putting together the solution. ^This, and this http://www.helpscout.net/blog/why-steve-jobs-never-listened-to-his-customers/ http://www.helpscout.net/blog/why-steve-jobs-never-listened-...
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
davidroetzel 12y ago
This kind of advice pops up on HN from time to time and while I believe it to be valuable, I guess it is at least incomplete. Here are two stories from my failed ventures to augment this advice: 1) Years ago I started a small side-business with a few colleagues. It was a web-based service for a very specific group of clients. Best of all: The idea had already been validated. We had our first paying customer before we even built the product. And we quickly found a few other customers. But after a few sign-ups things were not looking so good anymore. Even though our early adopters were well known in the industry, other companies would not follow. Everyone we talked to loved the product, but as we had to learn the hard way nobody was willing to pay for it. Some even went so far as to implement possibly illegal solutions instead of paying us a few bucks. Lesson learned: Even if you talk to a few possible customers, question hard if those really are representative of your target audience. Also, liking a product/idea is not the same as being willing (or able) to pay for it. 2) A while back I wanted to find out if there would be any commercial interest in an app I had already built. So I set up a landing page and collected email addresses. Since I had already built the app I could easily hand out demo accounts for every interested party. I quickly collected around 60 addresses and set them all up with a demo account. Only a single person ever logged in at all! I sent out reminder emails but did not get a single response. To this day I do not fully understand what went wrong. Lesson learned: Newsletter- or Beta-signups from your landing page is NOT the same as validation for your idea.
- gchokov 12y ago
  That's is all well put together, and illustrates my idea in the other comments, why validation is not the silver bullet. Thank you for sharing your experience!
- w1ntermute 12y ago
  Note that these sorts of problems are not specific to startups. They apply to any sort of polling situation. For example, political campaigns face similar challenges.
- mason55 12y ago
  > Also, liking a product/idea is not the same as being willing (or able) to pay for it. A great thing to do is when you're validating products you ask the prospect how much they'll pay. Then say "Ok, so if I put a contract in front of you that says you'll pay $x if I deliver this product you will sign it?" You'll find out very quickly whether someone is just being nice or whether they are serious.
dammitcoetzee 12y ago
How is the scientific method not used for this always? The scientific method and way of thinking is probably the most useful thing you can ever master. Science allows you to set up a question and then set up an experiment in such a way that you cannot lie to yourself about the result. For example, let's ask the question: Is my business doing well? A layman's approach will almost certainly be evaluated on a subjective/emotional basis. i.e. "We are doing something great!" "Everyone is happy." "I have so many customers" "Funding is in!" "I got a great review on tech crunch three months ago" A more scientific approach is to first define the question in such a way that it can be measured. So let's say a business that does well does three things: Does not lose money, Has happy customers(low support calls/emails, high reviews,product is used), Has happy employees (low turnover, gets quality work done (measurable by issue tracking) Now you can say: Does my business meet the requirements for a successful business. If no, write down those numbers. That is now your control and baseline. It is time to experiment. It's best not to change more than one thing at a time in science so you know exactly what the effect is vs the control. Lets say you realize you're losing money and your customers aren't happy. You do some research and come to believe (not know) that it's because the login screen is incredibly awkward. Google analytics shows that the bounce rate for the front page is huge so there's some data to back this up. It's time to form your first hypothesis. My business isn't doing well because the login page is so incredibly awkward. If I fix the login page the business will do better. Remember that both the "awkward" and "do better" while subjective declarations have actual metrics to back them up: bounce rate on analytics and the previously defined metrics for a good business. Now you do the experiment defined earlier: fix the login page. Now you collect data. If your bounce rate goes down, your customers are happier and start paying the monthly fee. Then you have solved your problem and you know with a very high degree of certainty how you have solved your problem. Now let's say you looked at the data at the end of this experiment and noticed a decrease from the control you set a while back. Well, obviously that was not the problem (or at least not 100% the problem, part of science is knowing how certain to be about things) Maybe next you can define the problem as: the site is buggy, issues aren't resolved quickly. If I observe my employees I can see that they spend a lot of time staring at the 98inch projector screen I set up in my 'cool office' instead of coding. Now you can do a trial run of turning off the projector on some days vs others and seeing if the work goes up, stays the same, or goes down. Or you can discuss the problem with your employees and see if they have input. Then define the experiment using that; just don't forget to actually measure something objective at the end of the day. This way of thinking is invaluable. You can drill down exactly to the problem core. Waste less resources. Argue less. Most importantly you can actually sit down at the end of the day and prove that you have solved a problem with actual data that cannot be easily disputed, and if you've really done it right the experiment can be repeated and have the same result each time.
WhitneyLand 12y ago
Look at it from reverse - of all the big/successful startups out there how many used any formality or rigor in validating their ideas? Even if they did validate early on what made them successful often changed drastically based on what was known when the company was started. In otherwords, what percentage of the time does this payoff?
- w1ntermute 12y ago
  Out of the four $10b+ companies founded since 2007, Dropbox and Airbnb definitely used Lean techniques[0], and Uber probably did[1]. That only leaves WhatsApp, which there isn't much information about out there. But considering how little funding they took, it's safe to assume that they utilized similar techniques. 0: http://www.hult.edu/en/news/hult-labs/2013/august/the-lean-startup-methodology--a-movement-transforming-business-development/ http://www.hult.edu/en/news/hult-labs/2013/august/the-lean-s... 1: http://www.quora.com/Lean-Startups/Did-Uber-use-any-lean-startup-methodologies-or-perform-customer-validation http://www.quora.com/Lean-Startups/Did-Uber-use-any-lean-sta...
coldcode 12y ago
A startup I know had a great idea, great product name, validation from some actual people in the industry that it was something everyone would want. They built it and launched and discovered that the industry as a whole was technology phobic; the problem was that the supposedly representative people they talked to where among the few that understood the benefits of the technology (in this case mobile). It's like a poll I read about in the 30's where pollers called a lot of people to ask about phone usage. The problem was that they only talked to people with phones so the answers were useless.
- zacharycohn 12y ago
  So... they didn't have validation, then?
mccolin 12y ago
"Fall in love with the problem, not the solution" great advice
shanecleveland 12y ago
I'm trying an idea for a small project that I am sure I stole from Hacker News. I run a football pool at my office, and I was manually creating each week's list of games. So I scratched my own itch and automated this as much as possible (some manual work). I've made the results available on footballpickempool.net. It simply offers weekly pool sheets for the full season, and results will also be posted. I know many people could find this useful, but not necessarily a paying audience for such a simple offering. The validation idea I'd seen before was to offer a link to a "feature," and see how many people click on it. So I have a "Start a League" link. The page let's them know that this feature is not available yet. And I also have a Google form on the page asking if anyone would pay a small amount for this feature. Hopefully I see some results as the upcoming season starts.
bane 12y ago
I can give these two piece of advice. 1) Don't delude yourself into thinking you're "changing" the world (for some ridiculous definition of changing). It's most likely that you aren't. Focus on the business fundamentals. There's an awful lot of startups making very ho-hum products -- small incremental improvements to existing things or dead end paths that nobody would ever possibly want. They've convinced themselves and their VCs that if only the entire world starts using their chat app or appointment reminder, that world peace would break out and we'd live in a Bill and Ted future where Rock music unites us all. They then build a business model that actually requires some percentage of humanity to get on board with their app to become profitable. They also forget that to the VCs, they don't care about changing the world, the company is the product and in the end the company will be sold for parts to the highest bidder. The business needs to optimize for this case because this is what the end-game looks like. Not a neon colored future where everybody is playing air guitar and peace and tranquility because they used your app. 2) If you're bringing lots of technology into the startup, it's not necessarily an advantage. Technological debt can absolutely cripple you. And by the time you've realized it, you're completely out of money and left with old technology that nobody wants. I know of a more than a few startups that get kicked off with a million lines of existing software. They think it's the matter of some source clean up and some new paint on the front end and it'll be easy street. Inevitably, they spend most of their VC investment bringing this legacy to market and getting customer #1. Feedback from early customers is positive, but with one caveat, "this software needs to do x, where x requires a fundamental rewrite of the entire product. By the time a decision is made to start a ground-up rewrite to support x the company is a couple years in and has lost all of the momentum a startup needs when coming out of stealth mode. rewrite = reboot of the company. You accomplish the rewrite, pitching it as the next version, but shifting entire technology stacks doesn't feel like a version bump to the customers (it's a huge investment for them as well). All the sales activity you've done over the last year is also junk, unless you feel like supporting the old and new versions simultaneously, and you probably don't have the resources to do that well. By the end, you're out of VC, coasting on what your sales team is pulling in, but not moving revenue in enough of a positive direction to exit or raise another round. You try to sell it on the cheap and recoup the VC, but buyers are wary of the now very old technological debt you've accumulated and the small customer base you're bringing to the deal. Along the way you pick up some very onerous, non-friendly software licenses for some of your components -- %of gross revenue or something even more onerous like GPLv3 which makes your entire technological investment worthless. Buyers doing due diligence decide not to buy. Your company is a zombie at this point.
joereggan190 12y ago
http://bordeaux.craigslist.fr/res/4615532439.html http://bordeaux.craigslist.fr/res/4615532439.html

150 points by alex_ka 12y ago

It's quite difficult to validate an idea, after FFF approved it and when you start development. In our startup we found it quite difficult to find the resources, where our target audience is located.

gchokov 12y ago

While I do see the value of validation, this is not a silver bullet. People try to simplify things, find patterns, but this cannot always work. There are so many reasons why I would not want to validate things: - Sometimes, people will not tell you what they want, because often they do not know what they want, until you show it to them. Someone smarter than me said this before. - People judge from their experience. You can have the perfect group to validate with.. but their experience will trick you. Building a product is an art. There way too many things one should consider based on his experience and intelligence, not everything can be quantified and calculated (well, it can be, but still with assumptions, and once you assume...). As one of my favorite photographers says, "There are no rules for good photographs, there are just good photographs". Same can be said when building a product..

YL108 12y ago
You are also right! I think if you've build several products before it's more easy to choose the right path building great products. But I do also see a lot of people just building something behind closed doors without thinking about the problem they really want to solve. Of course, justyo.co for example... I don't think there was a huge need in sending YO's :D
- gchokov 12y ago
  Yes, when you've built several products, you definitely start to see things that work and things that do not work and you gain experience. Again, I am not against validation, it just should be used moderately and not exclusively as a key indicator if you should build something or not. Products like justyo.co popup once in a while and due to some pretty random events at some point they become a hype. I tend to think the creators are having a lot of fun as well, without really thinking for monetization that much.
vdaniuk 12y ago
"There are no rules for good photographs, there are just good photographs". I disagree with this and think that it is a self-defeating, irrational attitude. Sure, validation is not a silver bullet. However, lots of startups make it or break due to luck and no-one(yet) can't eliminate randomness in a stochastic(debatable) system like technology entrepreneurship ecosystem. Validation helps to decrease the chance of failing, though. The famous quote by George Box reads "Remember that all models are wrong; the practical question is how wrong do they have to be to not be useful." Also validation is not listening to what people tell, it's also observing actions of users when they interact with the MVP.
- gchokov 12y ago
  It's funny that I mentioned randomness in my second comment as well :) I tend to agree with you to some extent, even about the quote for the comment. But, startups as an example fails to me, because as we all know, most of the startups fail anyway. p.s. there are rules for good photographs but following the rules can only put you on bar with other people. Learns the rules so that you can break them. Learn to validate so that you know when NOT to validate.
  - vdaniuk 12y ago
    Hm, I have an interesting thought. If "rules" is a consensus about best practices it is a standard model of the particular domain. Conditions of narrative manipulation and tragedy of the commons apply. With that in mind, one should break the rules only if they have a high degree of confidence in their ability to discover a model that is better than standard model or understanding that the entire modelling approach is tainted. However, Dunning-Kruger effect hypothesis states that less competent are irrationally sure of themselves and vice versa. Are we in a situation where most actors on the market are trying to break the rules to their own detriment?
- dunmalg 12y ago
  >"There are no rules for good photographs, there are just good photographs". I disagree with this and think that it is a self-defeating, irrational attitude. Yeah, I think he's misinterpreting what his photographer friend means. There are TONS of rules for good photographs, everything from technical ("sufficient lighting") all the way up to art theory ("rule of thirds"). The guy's point was probably that any subject, at any time, can possibly be photographed in a way the conforms to the requirements of an artistically pleasing image. Trying to fit that notion to the idea that entrepreneurs should just leap for the stars without checking to see if their figurative lens cap is off is not really very sound.
noonespecial 12y ago
>"There are no rules for good photographs, there are just good photographs". There are also lots and lots (and more lots) of bad photographs. There might not be specific rules for taking really stand-out pictures, but there sure are good rules for what not to do.
- aeden 12y ago
  Photographers take many more bad photos than good ones. Entrepreneurs fail more often than they succeed. We just tend to avoid showing bad photos and talking about failed businesses in public.
- kisielk 12y ago
  And yet a lot of times the best photographs are the ones that break the rules of what not to do...
  - zacharycohn 12y ago
    On purpose. Bad photographers break rules they don't know exist. Good photographers break rules on purpose, in very specific ways, to achieve a very specific effect.
wpietri 12y ago
It sounds to me like you haven't had much practice validating things. Nobody serious about this sort of validation would suggest you ask people what they want. Instead, when you think you know what people really want, it's your job to prove that. Suppose that you make something that you're convinced is the best product in the world. You work for years, you spend millions. And then you launch. It turns out that nobody cares; you go bankrupt. Someone might ask: "Was it really a great product?" We could argue the answer to that, but I think it's the wrong question. Businesses need to be sustainable. Some ideas work, some don't. I think the best thing we can do is to a) maximize our chances of success, and b) minimize the cost of our failures. I believe the only way to do that is to continuously and aggressively test our hypotheses. Otherwise, investment just ends up being the way we fool ourselves a little longer. Products aren't art. They're commerce. If you want to do art, just do art.
thenomad 12y ago
There are lots and lots of rules for good visual composition, of which "good photographs" are a subset. Some people instinctively understand them. Some people have spent years painstakingly learning them, and now choose to break them from time to time. But there are plenty of rules, and if you're not already a genius or an expert, learning and following those rules is a reliable way to improve your photography.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

maninalift 12y ago

I usually skip the start-up advice posts on HN but this was worth reading for the first point along "focus on the problem not the solution". Good advice for hackers as well as entrepreneurs.

jlcummings 12y ago

Nitpicking, but removing "business" from the title would fit the article body a bit better. Questioning the viability of potential products and services is far different than evaluation of "business" modes or models. Good products will not save or propel a bad business, but good businesses can thrive on marginal and even terrible products.

poseid 12y ago

"After all, it took Thomas Edison hundreds of attempts before he invented the light bulb" -> It still not easy, people were used to candles at that time. Edison did not study the candle making process or the problems of people with candles. His genius was in putting together the solution. Apart from this, the article is nice indeed.

joeyspn 12y ago
> It still not easy, people were used to candles at that time. Edison did not study the candle making process or the problems of people with candles. His genius was in putting together the solution. ^This, and this http://www.helpscout.net/blog/why-steve-jobs-never-listened-to-his-customers/ http://www.helpscout.net/blog/why-steve-jobs-never-listened-...
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]

davidroetzel 12y ago

This kind of advice pops up on HN from time to time and while I believe it to be valuable, I guess it is at least incomplete. Here are two stories from my failed ventures to augment this advice: 1) Years ago I started a small side-business with a few colleagues. It was a web-based service for a very specific group of clients. Best of all: The idea had already been validated. We had our first paying customer before we even built the product. And we quickly found a few other customers. But after a few sign-ups things were not looking so good anymore. Even though our early adopters were well known in the industry, other companies would not follow. Everyone we talked to loved the product, but as we had to learn the hard way nobody was willing to pay for it. Some even went so far as to implement possibly illegal solutions instead of paying us a few bucks. Lesson learned: Even if you talk to a few possible customers, question hard if those really are representative of your target audience. Also, liking a product/idea is not the same as being willing (or able) to pay for it. 2) A while back I wanted to find out if there would be any commercial interest in an app I had already built. So I set up a landing page and collected email addresses. Since I had already built the app I could easily hand out demo accounts for every interested party. I quickly collected around 60 addresses and set them all up with a demo account. Only a single person ever logged in at all! I sent out reminder emails but did not get a single response. To this day I do not fully understand what went wrong. Lesson learned: Newsletter- or Beta-signups from your landing page is NOT the same as validation for your idea.

gchokov 12y ago
That's is all well put together, and illustrates my idea in the other comments, why validation is not the silver bullet. Thank you for sharing your experience!
w1ntermute 12y ago
Note that these sorts of problems are not specific to startups. They apply to any sort of polling situation. For example, political campaigns face similar challenges.
mason55 12y ago
> Also, liking a product/idea is not the same as being willing (or able) to pay for it. A great thing to do is when you're validating products you ask the prospect how much they'll pay. Then say "Ok, so if I put a contract in front of you that says you'll pay $x if I deliver this product you will sign it?" You'll find out very quickly whether someone is just being nice or whether they are serious.

dammitcoetzee 12y ago

How is the scientific method not used for this always? The scientific method and way of thinking is probably the most useful thing you can ever master. Science allows you to set up a question and then set up an experiment in such a way that you cannot lie to yourself about the result. For example, let's ask the question: Is my business doing well? A layman's approach will almost certainly be evaluated on a subjective/emotional basis. i.e. "We are doing something great!" "Everyone is happy." "I have so many customers" "Funding is in!" "I got a great review on tech crunch three months ago" A more scientific approach is to first define the question in such a way that it can be measured. So let's say a business that does well does three things: Does not lose money, Has happy customers(low support calls/emails, high reviews,product is used), Has happy employees (low turnover, gets quality work done (measurable by issue tracking) Now you can say: Does my business meet the requirements for a successful business. If no, write down those numbers. That is now your control and baseline. It is time to experiment. It's best not to change more than one thing at a time in science so you know exactly what the effect is vs the control. Lets say you realize you're losing money and your customers aren't happy. You do some research and come to believe (not know) that it's because the login screen is incredibly awkward. Google analytics shows that the bounce rate for the front page is huge so there's some data to back this up. It's time to form your first hypothesis. My business isn't doing well because the login page is so incredibly awkward. If I fix the login page the business will do better. Remember that both the "awkward" and "do better" while subjective declarations have actual metrics to back them up: bounce rate on analytics and the previously defined metrics for a good business. Now you do the experiment defined earlier: fix the login page. Now you collect data. If your bounce rate goes down, your customers are happier and start paying the monthly fee. Then you have solved your problem and you know with a very high degree of certainty how you have solved your problem. Now let's say you looked at the data at the end of this experiment and noticed a decrease from the control you set a while back. Well, obviously that was not the problem (or at least not 100% the problem, part of science is knowing how certain to be about things) Maybe next you can define the problem as: the site is buggy, issues aren't resolved quickly. If I observe my employees I can see that they spend a lot of time staring at the 98inch projector screen I set up in my 'cool office' instead of coding. Now you can do a trial run of turning off the projector on some days vs others and seeing if the work goes up, stays the same, or goes down. Or you can discuss the problem with your employees and see if they have input. Then define the experiment using that; just don't forget to actually measure something objective at the end of the day. This way of thinking is invaluable. You can drill down exactly to the problem core. Waste less resources. Argue less. Most importantly you can actually sit down at the end of the day and prove that you have solved a problem with actual data that cannot be easily disputed, and if you've really done it right the experiment can be repeated and have the same result each time.

WhitneyLand 12y ago

Look at it from reverse - of all the big/successful startups out there how many used any formality or rigor in validating their ideas? Even if they did validate early on what made them successful often changed drastically based on what was known when the company was started. In otherwords, what percentage of the time does this payoff?

w1ntermute 12y ago
Out of the four $10b+ companies founded since 2007, Dropbox and Airbnb definitely used Lean techniques[0], and Uber probably did[1]. That only leaves WhatsApp, which there isn't much information about out there. But considering how little funding they took, it's safe to assume that they utilized similar techniques. 0: http://www.hult.edu/en/news/hult-labs/2013/august/the-lean-startup-methodology--a-movement-transforming-business-development/ http://www.hult.edu/en/news/hult-labs/2013/august/the-lean-s... 1: http://www.quora.com/Lean-Startups/Did-Uber-use-any-lean-startup-methodologies-or-perform-customer-validation http://www.quora.com/Lean-Startups/Did-Uber-use-any-lean-sta...

coldcode 12y ago

A startup I know had a great idea, great product name, validation from some actual people in the industry that it was something everyone would want. They built it and launched and discovered that the industry as a whole was technology phobic; the problem was that the supposedly representative people they talked to where among the few that understood the benefits of the technology (in this case mobile). It's like a poll I read about in the 30's where pollers called a lot of people to ask about phone usage. The problem was that they only talked to people with phones so the answers were useless.

zacharycohn 12y ago
So... they didn't have validation, then?

mccolin 12y ago

"Fall in love with the problem, not the solution" great advice

shanecleveland 12y ago

I'm trying an idea for a small project that I am sure I stole from Hacker News. I run a football pool at my office, and I was manually creating each week's list of games. So I scratched my own itch and automated this as much as possible (some manual work). I've made the results available on footballpickempool.net. It simply offers weekly pool sheets for the full season, and results will also be posted. I know many people could find this useful, but not necessarily a paying audience for such a simple offering. The validation idea I'd seen before was to offer a link to a "feature," and see how many people click on it. So I have a "Start a League" link. The page let's them know that this feature is not available yet. And I also have a Google form on the page asking if anyone would pay a small amount for this feature. Hopefully I see some results as the upcoming season starts.

bane 12y ago

I can give these two piece of advice. 1) Don't delude yourself into thinking you're "changing" the world (for some ridiculous definition of changing). It's most likely that you aren't. Focus on the business fundamentals. There's an awful lot of startups making very ho-hum products -- small incremental improvements to existing things or dead end paths that nobody would ever possibly want. They've convinced themselves and their VCs that if only the entire world starts using their chat app or appointment reminder, that world peace would break out and we'd live in a Bill and Ted future where Rock music unites us all. They then build a business model that actually requires some percentage of humanity to get on board with their app to become profitable. They also forget that to the VCs, they don't care about changing the world, the company is the product and in the end the company will be sold for parts to the highest bidder. The business needs to optimize for this case because this is what the end-game looks like. Not a neon colored future where everybody is playing air guitar and peace and tranquility because they used your app. 2) If you're bringing lots of technology into the startup, it's not necessarily an advantage. Technological debt can absolutely cripple you. And by the time you've realized it, you're completely out of money and left with old technology that nobody wants. I know of a more than a few startups that get kicked off with a million lines of existing software. They think it's the matter of some source clean up and some new paint on the front end and it'll be easy street. Inevitably, they spend most of their VC investment bringing this legacy to market and getting customer #1. Feedback from early customers is positive, but with one caveat, "this software needs to do x, where x requires a fundamental rewrite of the entire product. By the time a decision is made to start a ground-up rewrite to support x the company is a couple years in and has lost all of the momentum a startup needs when coming out of stealth mode. rewrite = reboot of the company. You accomplish the rewrite, pitching it as the next version, but shifting entire technology stacks doesn't feel like a version bump to the customers (it's a huge investment for them as well). All the sales activity you've done over the last year is also junk, unless you feel like supporting the old and new versions simultaneously, and you probably don't have the resources to do that well. By the end, you're out of VC, coasting on what your sales team is pulling in, but not moving revenue in enough of a positive direction to exit or raise another round. You try to sell it on the cheap and recoup the VC, but buyers are wary of the now very old technological debt you've accumulated and the small customer base you're bringing to the deal. Along the way you pick up some very onerous, non-friendly software licenses for some of your components -- %of gross revenue or something even more onerous like GPLv3 which makes your entire technological investment worthless. Buyers doing due diligence decide not to buy. Your company is a zombie at this point.

joereggan190 12y ago

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