Balance between validation, development, and your own ideas

Hey IH,

I can't believe it has been 2 years since I attempted to launch a product: Launched on HN and Product Hunt [FAIL]. I've been building other stuff since then, but I wanted to attempt a new product again.

The idea is simple: Provide subscribe buttons to developers, websites, and content creators, so they can notify their audiences of something, through push notifications and various other channels. Right now, through Browser Notifications, and Telegram Messages.

I think this solves a simple problem that not everyone wants to be giving their emails away on every newsletter box, they probably want to be notified in a different way than what is currently available, for example via a simple Telegram Message. It could potentially be used as a catch all subscribe button for creators in different platforms, like those pages that contain all the links for a user. They could include a subscribe button as well to have all their audience reachable with custom notifications, instead of platform specific ones.

I've been building this "in public", sending daily updates on what I've been up to on Twitter, and through a secret blog that I've been writing for a month now, which I originally intended to be a 12 startups in 12 days type of thing but building simpler MVPs every week... I know crazy. You can take a look at: mvplog.com

Here is one example of such updates:

At this point, I've put quite a few days into this, and was looking to see if this would be a thing that other people would like to use. I know the perfect candidate for this, and reached out to them to understand if this would be something interesting for them. I offered it for free, as they have helped me in the past, and I got a response. They seemed receptive, but don't how much validation that is for this idea, specially since I would give this service for free.

I think this is a real problem, and that this idea can help solve it. So I'm in the balance between the validation from the market vs going with my own ideas. I've stopped building before because I encountered a problem that I thought was very difficult to solve, but then resumed building when I found a good solution for it.

I would love to know what you think about all this. Should I seek more validation in a earlier stage? I always see people saying that we should validate the ideas before starting building, but should this be the case when you would be your own user, if this was available? Should I go after the content creator side? Should I focus more on the websites/developers?

Thanks for reading. You can subscribe to my journey on mvplog.com through my subscribe button 😉, or more specifically to this product's updates on subnot.mvplog.com if you are interested. The name is prone to change, but it is what it is right now. Also @AndreBaltazar on Twitter.