Help me overcome my fear of validating an idea

I've started building a landing page I've got in some kind of "stage fright"

First of all, this feeling is quite normal. I've experienced it myself and like anything it takes a while to get past it. Just keep in mind that the whole point of validation is so that you can quickly decide if your idea has legs. You should expect to be wrong most of the time. It's much better to find out that your idea sucks early so that you can move on and try something else.

Part of your fear comes from the misbelief that good ideas are rare and your not going to have another one. This is simply not true. Having ideas is like building a muscle. If you exercise your idea muscle regularly you'll start having lots of ideas.

What you should be aiming for is having so many ideas that you actually want to throw some of them away. Think of validation as a way to filter out the crappy ideas from the good ones so you can focus on those that matter.

Look,

There's a lot of good toy apps that make people's lives easier, many programmers write complex automation to make things easy for them.

but most people won't pay for them. The reason why everyone says solve a "real" problem is because you want to find something that annoys people so much that they would pay for that convenience

Just ask yourself, would you pay $9/mo to make sure you don't have too much food? have you found even 1 person who would? even Netflix charges you $9/mo and so does SkillShare. It's just an example.

Having people open their wallets is hard. Make sure the perceived value of your product is so high that people say shut-up and take my money.

What if you scanned receipts and estimated expiry dates based on buy dates instead? So much less friction.

Putting your idea out there is a great first step. I commend you for that!

But I find it hard to believe anyone would really use this. Is it 10x better than setting reminders on your phone, using a pen and paper, or simply just remembering the expiration dates? And do people find it to be an acute enough problem that they would pay for such an app?

I doubt most people would. The only chance of success that I see with this is if you target people who buy obscene amounts of food and need to track them all. Perhaps chefs or restaurateurs?

Anyway, best of luck. As always you should validate your idea by talking directly with your target audience. Talking to anyone else is a waste of time :)

Great job publishing your idea. My thoughts are that your solution or value proposal is not significantly better than society's current solution (memory + checking the fridge, etc), so it poses the challenge of monetization and user acquisition, behavior is hard to change if the problem is not frequent, urgent, mandatory (see hacker school video on evaluating start up ideas). Of course try to validate your idea by talking to people about their lives and their past and don't take biased opinions like ours as validation.

It seems useful but, as many other people have commented, the point of failure is believing that people will have the will to go one by one adding the dates (I wouldn't).

What if you just take a picture of the invoice, collect the entire data at once, and then estimate a deadline? Maybe there's already a big dataset out there and you can start testing it.

I personally think the idea would work, only if you are able to implement a very smart machine learning model.

Without it, it's just way too much work for someone to input data onto an app, about what food they bought & the expiration date. That would literally take 20 - 30 min of their time, just to fill that data in.

If you could find a way to remove that process, or drastically shorten it, then I can see this product being quite popular.

Just my 2 cents.

Find what is missing in this marketplace and supply it. To do that, gather feedback from users of similar apps. You do that by determining who they are and spending a little in time and/or money. FB ads, articles like the one you linked too, etc... Just have a mechanism for feedback. Above all, do not be afraid to test and learn.

Sounds like a very useful product - the problem is that there are multiple apps out there with the same intention.
You should make a list of all competing apps and then find out, how you can be better than the others.
Speaking for myself - I would love to have a better overview of what's going on in our families refrigerator. But since we're a six-person household we need a lot of food and it would take too long to enter the best-before date manually.
What about playing around with image recognition - there are a lot of cloud-based services available to help you with this - maybe this could be the killer-feature that others don't have implemented (yet)?

failure is common case