Stop Building Products Nobody Wants: The Validation Method That Works
12 Taikhoom10 20 7/16/2025, 6:05:48 PM
Hey HN,
Recently I have been working on a couple startups in SF. And I have noticed talking to a lot of founders, since my target users are early stage founders, that they are hyper focused on building.
Often they come up with a idea they think is great and can't stop thinking about it and just shoot out to build it. Often they might go months on long just straight building. And while building is extremely important, and being so passionate about is great. I have come to realize they often end up not really validating anything.
So after a lot of testing and validation, and reading the "Mom test" of course, I think I know the best way to validate.
Before you build anything, have a clear way to define what you are building, whip up a quick landing page and get people to pay. Show them demos, and really get the landing page in front of them. If people will pay before even building something, that is a great sign for you to go ahead and build as well a to investors.
So yeah, I just wanted to put that out there, if anyone has anything to say let me know.
Better to talk to people and iterate on prototypes with a handful of pilot users until they are willing to pay, them expand beyond the pilot group. Not only it is real communication and iteration with users, we aren't spamming the world with "landing pages" of products that do not actually exist.
The mechanics may differ, but the point is the same. Validating the idea with real customers, finding those customers, getting them to be interested, is exactly the hard part.
Once you have a way to reach your projected customers, once you've even determined they exist, then you should start building.
Building first, then wondering who the customer is, or how to reach them, is a waste of time and money.
A better approach is to talk to as many potential customers as possible early on. Collect emails, show a rough prototype, get feedback, and iterate. Then, when you’re ready to launch, go back to those same people, email them, show what’s changed, and demo how the product delivers real value.
Needing to fill in the paperwork for a saas is a PITA. Is there anything I could add to the site or elsewhere that would have made that easier for you?
1) We had this methodology for over a decade now. Most of the business models that work with this have been mined out. The features that increase customer sales by 2-3x are the ones that nobody asked for.
2) Building prototypes is cheap. Like easier than making videos or slides. You don't need $100k and a few months to build features anymore.
3) Landing pages, wishlists, and product hunt have become a smell that these guys have no idea what they're doing. They're validating. The docs are incomplete, there's some tutorial videos on a screen that doesn't exist. 2 weeks later, these companies tell me they're pivoting to something agentic that I don't want.
Fuck that. It took us 3 days to build it internally. The logic for SaaS was that it caters for edge cases and maintenance that we don't want to do, but these modern SaaS don't want to do it either. If they knew what they were doing and if they cared, they wouldn't be playing the wishlist game.
Have some confidence in what you build. Do it better than your customers would do with Bolt or Lovable.
Similarly I have worked for systems that would sell a highly customized system to a company like Airbus or Comcast or Safety-Kleen and there would be a huge amount of work going into determining what exactly gets sold which again, is not comparable to going to some landing page and paying with a credit card.
If you're selling mattresses or something, maybe that's different.
I know who needs this, I understand their pain, but its really valuable to understand their procurement process as well. If they need to have sales people as part of the process, I need to know that (and cost it in.)
Talking to my target market, and understanding what it takes for them to pay me, is a big part of understanding if I have a real business idea or not.
And that's just a metric you can use to really see if people are interested in your product.
For consumer products what you're saying may make sense, but that is not the universe of all products and opportunities.
But overall I think people should focus on solving problems they have actually faced that have a "REAL" (tangible) ROI.
There are plenty of good businesses with a crappy website that are solving actual problems.