How to Validate Your Startup Idea

Getting Started: The earliest days of exploring a new startup are incredibly exciting but can also feel chaotic. It’s worth your time to implement a simple framework to guide your validation journey and help measure progress.?

The Validation Process: Identifying the right idea that’s complementary to your skills as a founder or founding team and that adds value to at least one segment of customers is hard! This process will very likely require a lot of patience and several iterations. It took our team nearly 5 months of running this process to land on an idea and a target market that we had high conviction on.

Crafting Your Hypothesis: Most founders start with a broad hypothesis based on a problem they’ve experienced in the past, an inefficiency they’ve noticed in an industry, or a novel application for a new technology. Start by jotting down what you know about your hypothesis so far - it’s ok if you don’t have a lot of details. A good start is to articulate what problem you’re solving and who you think will pay you to solve this problem. List every target group you think your solution might apply to even if the fit isn’t obvious at this stage.

Designing Interview Questions: The key to this step is to develop 5 or so open-ended questions that are intended to teach you more about your target audience’s pain points. Be very careful not to ask leading questions that relate to your solution (if you have one in mind already).? Some of the questions we asked during our discovery conversations were along the lines of- How does your team handle the development and maintenance of security integrations? and How much effort does it take to transform the incoming data from your integrations so it’s usable?

Building an Outreach List: Set targets for how many conversations you want to have per week and in total. This number should help you determine how many messages you need to send. Assume a 5-10% conversion rate at this stage. Don’t make too many assumptions too early- start by identifying a broad range of individuals in different roles, industries, etc. Tap into your existing network, join communities on Slack or Discord, and find relevant profiles on LinkedIn to build your target list and start reaching out. If you’re reaching out cold, be respectful and genuine. People are generally willing to be helpful when they know you’re trying to understand their problems better. You’re not selling anything yet so don’t come off as salesy.

Conducting the Interviews: Consistency when interviewing your audience. Stick to your question script and record individual responses. We created a discovery call template and logged notes from our interviews in Notion so they were easy to search through.

Refinement: You should start to notice some themes emerge after your first 5-10 calls. Use these insights to help refine your hypothesis and narrow in on the ICP that it resonates with. Remember that not every signal will be a positive one and that’s ok. It’s better to learn early that a core assumption you’re making with your hypothesis is invalid. You’ll very likely need to repeat this step several times before you can identify a very specific problem statement you can build a solution around. An approach that worked well for our team was to split our interviews into a discovery segment and a solution oriented one once we had strong conviction on our solution. This approach ensures that you continue learning about the broad problems your audience is dealing with.

Visual Aids: The quality of insights you’re able to gather will be a lot higher if you’re able to convey your solution with visuals. You don’t need to focus on aesthetics at this stage but investing your time in building a clickable Figma prototype, wireframes in Miro, or even a couple of slides with diagrams explaining your solution will go a long way.

Pricing Insights: One of the final and most important signals you want to gather is around pricing. It can feel very awkward to ask your prospects what they’d be willing to pay for a solution that doesn’t exist yet but you have to make sure to ask it. The drawback of talking to helpful people is that they also tend to have an optimistic view of the world. Asking a pointed question or two about the value of your product forces them to quantify their pain points and helps you build conviction that there’s a big enough market to go after.

This approach worked for us at Leen but I’m sure there are other great frameworks out there. I’m eager to hear from other founders- How did you validate your startup idea?