"I never work on a product that is never validated"
One of the things that more tech startups are more criticized for is that they tend to make products that no one wants.
This is why product validation is key. By validating a product with your intended audience, you can discover problems that you can solve it.
How that product is built doesn't matter how long as you address the main core problem and how much that problem is relevant.
There are many ways to validate a product (even if it is outside of your market) by communicating and researching about a market that you do not understand.
For example, if you want to validate a billion-dollar scope problem, you should best aim for general problems that can be supported with a 8-billion business model.
Other times, you can research and find niched problems that your business can create a monopoly in.
If you are interested in discussing more about market research, feel free to post below below.
My experience in market research is that I help proactive entrepreneurs to find the best available growth strategies for their potential product on Fiverr here: https://www.fiverr.com/share/bLNG5p and also for $20 here: https://0ay22st18ux.typeform.com/to/KARHxefJ
Nice! How would you go about validating a product? Ask somebody to pay for it? Typeforms/surveys? Actually just asking people on reddit/discord?
Very interesting! Some advice, I think your website https://0ay22st18ux.typeform.com/to/KARHxefJ, has a hard to follow domain name, and customers would probably want to see more of what you offer first before entering anything.
For market research, I mainly just DM'd a bunch of people on Linkedin asking for customer interviews through a jotform. I got a few, but they went nowhere in terms of gathering valuable data.
However, I noticed I gained much more traction just having casual conversations with people on discord and reddit.
Mainly, I think a lot of customer research comes in the form of genuinely interacting with people and pushing your product idea gently.
Of course, that's only for more personal in-depth research. You can also just read posts by people having issues with things and ask around there or glean some general info from it.
For example, for https://www.indiehackers.com/product/evoke, it's a web API for various AI for developers, mainly Stable Diffusion and a GPT-3 alternative called Bloom.
Because of this, I trawled the Stable Diffusion, GPT-3, and OpenAI subreddits and searched up the word "app", "project", or "software" in the searchbar to see what difficulties people were having with the aforementioned products that already exist.
If I find their problems are vague, then I post some comments asking more specifically what they didn't like about the product.
If you want to see more about Evoke, I post about it a lot on Twitter https://twitter.com/TheRealEtch so feel free to follow