How to Validate Your Startup Idea
Build what people truly want by validating your idea before you build
Early-stage founders (an especially technical founders) often rush to build. A better approach is the Lean Startup mindset: treat your idea like a hypothesis to test. Build just enough (a landing page, explainer video or service offering) to learn if real customers care. Eric Ries himself defines an MVP as “that version of a new product that allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort.” In practice this means spending time on customer discovery and quick experiments instead of premature development.
Talk to (Potential) Customers First
Start by interviewing people who face the problem you want to solve. Ask open-ended questions about their needs, not “Would you use my product?”（the Mom Test approach). For example, ask “How do you solve X today? Can you describe the last time you had that problem?” Frameworks like Lean Market Validation explicitly include “Conduct Customer Validation Interviews” as a key step. Through conversations you’ll uncover real pain points, budgets and workflows – often far different from your assumptions. Don’t lead people to praise your idea; get to the truth.
Do: Listen for problems, past behavior, and potential commitments.
Don’t: Pitch your solution or ask hypothetical “yes/no” questions. (Rob Fitzpatrick’s The Mom Test is a good guide.)
Focus on the problem, not your solution. (Ask how they currently cope with the issue.)
Find evidence of true need (budget, frequency, inefficiencies).
Seek a commitment: e.g. ask if they’d sign up for early access or pay.
Smoke Tests: Landing Pages, Ads & Pre-sales
Next, validate demand with simple experiments. One common technique is a Landing Page MVP: create a website that sells your future product (features, pricing, sign-up form) and drive traffic to it. Track how many visitors click “Buy” or submit their email. This is even easier today with no-code tools or site builders There are so many services that let you spin up websites with a few prompts e.g. Lovable, Bolt or Replit.
Buffer’s founders launched a two-page site asking visitors to choose free vs paid plans; many people actually opted to pay, proving demand. Similarly, you can run cheap Google or Facebook ads or post on social media to gauge interest (clicks and form-signups are real data). If people are willing to click and pay, your idea has legs.
Landing Page / Waitlist: Build a page describing your product and invite email sign-ups. Measure sign-ups or click-throughs.
Explainer Video: Make a short demo video (like Dropbox did) and ask people to register. Tools such as Google Veo 3 can help.
Wizard-of-Oz (Concierge MVP): Offer the product manually. For instance, Nick Swinmurn (founder of Zappos) posted pictures of shoes online and, when orders came in, he simply bought the shoes from a store and shipped them. No code was needed – just validate the concept.
Pre-sales / Crowdfunding: Try to get actual money or deposits before building. If 10 people are ready to pay for your prototype, you’ve validated demand.
In each test, collect data (clicks, signups, conversations). Use tools like Google Analytics, email forms or simple surveys. Remember: real actions (signing up, paying, referring) beat polite answers.
Build a No-Code MVP or Prototype
Once you see interest, you can quickly mock up a prototype without coding. No-code platforms like Webflow, Bubble, Glide, Airtable, or even simple tools like Google Forms and Notion can launch interactive MVPs fast. The point is to iterate rapidly. Even the most technical founders admit that no-code “solutions often bring your experiment to market much faster.” For example, you might use a drag-and-drop builder to simulate an app interface or use an online form (e.g. Typeform) as a “fake backend”. If people react positively, you’ve learned enough to justify development.
No-code tools: Webflow for pages, Lovable for apps, Airtable/Zapier/n8n for data workflows.
Manual MVP: Write a blog, make slides or a mockup. Even a simple Google Sheet or PDF can reveal interest.
Iterate with feedback: Show prototypes to users and refine wording, features or prices.
The goal isn’t polishing, it’s learning. One VC once put it “Your most important metric to optimize in the beginning is not money, it’s insights.”
Sell or Consult Before You Build
In some markets, the strongest validation is a paid customer. Consider offering a service or consulting that solves the same problem. This does two things: you earn runway, and you deeply understand customer pain. For example, the founders of 37signals (now Basecamp) began as a web-design consulting firm. When internal chaos made them build a project-management tool, clients quickly asked “Can we use this too?”. They launched Basecamp officially and set a modest goal ($5K/month in a year) which they hit in just 6 weeks. In effect, each consulting project was a micro-validation of their product idea.
The same way my friend Patrick Häde first ran a development agency called Sonic. While doing that he discovered the issue marketing asset creation and how AI can help. So he founded Superscale.
Consulting/Services: Solve problems one-on-one for customers (e.g. custom implementations). If clients pay to solve the problem, your product is likely needed.
White-label or Prototype Sales: Offer your solution privately (with NDA) to early adopters or partners.
Extend runway: Use revenue from services to fund full product development, giving you more time to test and learn.
Share Your Idea (Don’t Hide It)
Many first-time founders fall into secrecy: “What if someone steals my idea?” In practice, execution matters far more than any initial idea. In fact, most people are not looking to copy your concept, and getting feedback can only help you. Talk to peers, mentors and even critics openly. You’ll learn that the idea will evolve anyway. Experienced entrepreneurs often say ideas are cheap – execution is everything. When you share a demo or landing page, you get valuable input and potentially early users. Remember, the goal is to validate your assumptions, not keep them secret.
Build in public: Write blog posts, tweet updates or share screenshots. Real engagement helps refine the idea.
Ask for feedback: Even lukewarm or negative reactions teach you what to fix. Don’t take criticism personally.
Network: Early users might come from the friends and followers you tell. At worst they give feedback; at best they become evangelists.
Resources and Real-World Examples
The strategies above echo classic startup wisdom. Eric Ries’s The Lean Startup emphasizes “validated learning” through MVP experiments. Steve Blank’s customer-development framework and Rob Fitzpatrick’s The Mom Test drill down on effective interviews. Look to successful companies as models: Buffer validated by pre-launch landing pages, Zappos by selling shoes without inventory, and even Dropbox by gauging interest with a demo video (another low-fidelity MVP). At my own startup Passbase, we followed this playbook: we spent months talking with crypto exchanges and KYC professionals before writing production code, so our product solved real compliance problems.
Key takeaways: Validate before you build. Use no-code tools, landing pages, videos or manual services to test demand. Only write production code after seeing real signs of interest (signups, payments, referrals). This way you save time and money—and build something people truly want. If there’s one lesson from Lean Startup methodology and countless founders, it’s that rapid testing and customer feedback trump hours spent coding in a vacuum.