100 sign-ups in two weeks. When is a product validated?

Sign up is good. But it's still sitting in the top funnel.

It's hard to tell if your idea is validated when you don't have any metrics about their mentorship activities. For sure this idea has been validated because of many mentorship platform out there. I think you need to focus on the true user activities but not vanity metrics.

e.g. I'm part of the mentor side of GrowthMentor. They don't celebrate the number of mentors & mentees on their platform. Instead, they focus on getting more mentorship calls booked. They passed 5,000 calls few months back after 2 years of operation.

Have people put in a credit card and paid yet?

Bang on @lgwb89 and @imthath_m :)

Congratulations on the initial positive response, that definitely fuels us to move forward.

10 paying customers at the price point you desire.

Everything else is at best promising but ultimately noise.

I'm wondering the same thing but I don't think there's any way to REALLY be sure. I think we're just stumbling in the dark. Obviously, getting paying customers is a good sign, but say I got a couple customers but I need 500 for ramen profitability? That's my case right now and I still have no clue if I consider my site 'validated' or not.

Congratulations for getting some initial users.

I would say validation is a three step process,
• Finding the right problem/needgap we can solve.
• Building a solution to solve that problem.
• Taking the solution to those who need it and them accepting it(Acceptance could be them using, paying, staying in the platform).

As for joinmentee in particular, any such networking platform would suffer from Chicken and Egg i.e. Mentees would join only when there are enough mentors, Mentors would join only when there are enough mentees.

To address that, start with a small target size of particular niche e.g. Mentors/Mentees of HW startups.

Congrats on getting some traction.

I second what @lgwb89 has said. Ideas are validated only when people are ready to pay for it.

I have experienced this first hand with two of my products. People will gladly sign up for the beta, but when you put a price on it - people won't buy if they don't actually love it or need it.

There's no 100% guarantee, but I'd say your chances are good. Getting positive feedback from your friends is useless, but if people bother to spend their time writing good things, you might be onto something. Not enough for things like quit your job and go full time into development for a few years, but enough to spend some time on an MVP and try and get first paying users. I'd say, it's Validation Stage 1.

In any case, you should first think about the numbers that you want to reach, then start validating. Like "if I get 100 sign-ups in 2 days, I consider it validated and go forward".

I like your plan for sending emails and asking people. I would also ask why they don't use other platforms. You can use this feedback for your landing page and also for PPC keywords/copy. Run Google Ads for a while and see the numbers: impression numbers will tell you if that niche is looking for a solution, CTR would probably tell you if people actually need a solution, and conversions indicate that your solution is good for them. That is, if your copy is good.

I'd say validation is a sliding scale, but I don't think you're close to the good side of the scale until you get people putting money on the line. There's such a big difference between 'sounds cool, I'll sign up' and 'I'm going to put my money where my mouth is'. When my co-founders and I launched Stacker for the first time, we got around 400 sign ups. No one ended up paying. (Lots of reasons for that, but the point is: the sign ups didn't add up to much.)

Correct niche: I'd be led by the area where people are most desperate to use your product - where they have this problem the most badly.

By the way, that's not to say that you didn't do a great job with this. You did! Congrats and good luck.