How do you validate an idea?

From the way I hold my fork to the way I put the food in my mouth to the way I chew, my wife notices -- and it does not come without criticisms -- everything. So I tell her about the idea. And she is straight with me: It sounds like it might be good, start small and lets test it. Or who might you be selling this to? Why do you want to make this? How long do you think it would take?

I also ask a programmer friend of mine of 20 years if he thinks its a potential idea that could take off. I also confide in my brother to see what he thinks.

And finally: I research possible search queries to see what might lead people to those products or services, what might I search for if I needed this product in my life.

I also try and get an idea on a board like this, Facebook groups, etc., to see if there is any interest in at all, or if people cannot even understand the idea of it.

Ideally you should discover ideas, not "come up with them".

Ideas that are discovered are already validated.

Here's an example of discovering an idea.

I'm reading Hacker News and someone posts a link to textql (https://github.com/dinedal/textql).

I notice that textql has 7506 GitHub starts and 192 people watching. That's a lot of stars. There are 7506 people that are interested in such a tool enough to star it and 192 that watch it.

All those people validated there is value in solving such a problem.

Now, textql already exists but it's a rather arcane command-line tool. Maybe I can make a desktop app that solves similar problem. Maybe I can make a web-based SaaS that solves similar problem.

Notice that I did not come up with that idea. Someone else did. I just noticed that other people thought it was interesting enough to get on front page of Hacker News and follow the project on GitHub.

All I did was participate in communities I'm interested in, keep my eyes open on interesting projects and come up with a twist that can possibly turn the idea into a viable software business.

You don't have to rely on such serendipity. There's a process that can be learned and follow to make such discovery a systemic process.

Amy Hoy calls it "Sales Safari" (https://stackingthebricks.com/video-sales-safari-in-action/), she has lots of free material on the topic (https://stackingthebricks.com/guides/your-first-10k/).

If you already have an idea, "Mom Test" shows how to try to validate this idea via conversations (https://blog.kowalczyk.info/dailynotes/note/b4u674cvj43jdajdsukg-summary-of-the-mom-test-book-about-validating-business-ideas).

As far as your hypothetical "social network for engineers", it's way too vague to even begin to validate.

I immediately thought of LinkedIn, which already exists.

Maybe in your head this is more fleshed out than "social network for engineers" but even if you were able to describe what it does, how it benefits people that are supposed to use it, it's impossible to validate it one or another.

Businesses that rely on network effects (like LinkedIn, Twitter and any other social network) are successful 99% due to network effects, not any particular feature.

Founders of LinkedIn could not have asked "will you be interested in a professional social network" because people had no notion of what would that entail. And yet people use LinkedIn.

As a general rule, unless you're already accomplished person with experience in running medium-sized company, stay away from any business that requires massive scale to be useful.

A business like this either grows into a great success or you spend more building and marketing it than your revenues.

I often find that people are bad at giving feedback on ideas alone. You might ask your friends if the idea is good and they'll think, "oh yeah, I know some engineers, I bet they'd love a social network!" or asking your engineering friends, "oh I bet OTHER engineers would find this useful."

A good place to start is by ironing out the real problem, "Engineers suffer from X and thus would pay to use a social network." X could be anytime but pick 1 thing, let's say "social isolation."

Next you should find out if X is even a real problem. Have a long interview with an engineer to talk about their life, problems, etc. Ask them about their relationships and what they are working on. See if they hint at the problem without you asking directly. That's a good start.

So if X is a problem, you just need to determine if you have the right solution. Generally I like to avoid "would you use this?" questions. Go for a really really really crude MVP. For example: create a Facebook group or Slack channel and invite some engineers. See if it starts to get sticky. You might find some new insights to help point your idea in a more specific direction. "Oh the engineers all just want to learn React Native... maybe I should build a React Native course?"

If you keep your focus on solving a single problem for a single group of people, you'll eventually get somewhere interesting. Just keep in mind this can (and usually does) drift quite a bit from the original idea!

I made a simple app for this exact purpose (https://beta.camp). It allows you to create your own page to explain what your product does and acquire email signups to gauge interest in your idea.

Simple, talk to engineers and ask them whether they like yet another social network for them, what problem it's solving, why they have to use it, do customer interview.