How do you validate an idea

p.s. not everyone is American.
Just a warning for other international users it is a very US centric questionnaire

@elietoubi you're validating your idea with that Typeform! :)

Well, you're starting to validate your idea with that Typeform. It's a very good start. Based on the questions, I've got a solid idea of what your idea is. Here are a few other ways to get validation:

1. Post to the Ideas and Validation group on IH
2. Self-affirmation is great (necessity being the mother of invention, and all)
3. Gather some external and fresh perspectives...create a Slack workspace and bring in some dangerous minds; find a subreddit that isn't toxic, etc.

One thing that is so difficult for everyone is confirmation bias...we all have it and it is a burden more often than not.

Human nature being what it is, chances are, others will have a similar problem to the one you're having. You must ask yourself:

1. What is my value proposition (i.e., what is going to be the one killer feature of my product)?
2. How do I monetize this?

If you can get those lined out and in alignment with your target market, then the rest is just the perseverance required to grind away. There is a lot of noise in this world, but you can still be heard.

Kudos to having enough salt to walk away from an albatross with belief in yourself! 🙃

FWIW - a friend and I just wrestled with this same problem and then productized our decisionmaking/validation process, in the form of a few helpful frameworks.

https://idea2mvp.carrd.co/

They're designed to help you get from idea to MVP faster and get unstuck if you're getting analysis paralysis around multiple ideas. Hope they help!

Hi

I typically start off by taking ideas through my validation checklist, which you can find here...

http://mrgrillet.com/journal/my-validation-checklist/

At this point, it's more about feeling out if my initial idea is something I want to pursue and to work out if I'm kind of on the right track before, I really flesh out the idea by talking to customers, which would be the next step.

We validated our pain point at a basic level using a type form survey. We surveyed about 100 sales reps through connections and connections of connections. The results we got were enough for us to want to dig deeper. From that point we started scheduling calls with people to just ask questions about the pain points we were interested in. I can't over state how much insight we derived from those calls! I would highly recommend talking to your potential users on the phone.