I rejected my first idea through validation today

This is an anti-milestone. But previously, I would have wasted 1 hour/day building out something for months. Would I have ever verified any piece of it? Absolutely not! Would anyone have used it? Absolutely not! So spending 3 weeks and $150 to reject an idea? A big milestone for me.

What did I try? I was curious about commodity marketplaces - ones where a bunch of undifferentiated services existed. I wondered whether I could just offer a similar feature set and get a low (but slightly profitable) number of signups. I found a market that seemed reasonable: ones for watching websites / domains for changes, and sending emails when changes are detected. I made a landing page and spent some time researching Google keywords. Later, I made a separate landing page and campaign for watching prices on Amazon.

I learned that this market isn't for me. The only people who indicated interest wanted a free plan. The number of people who clicked a CTA to sign up to watch a URL for free was high - like 40%. But once I explained that the service was a work-in-progress, only one person submitted a form with a URL they wanted to watch. Playing around in Excel, it was hard to find assumptions that made it seem worth the tech investment - even with unrealistically high free-to-paid rates. And when I was staring at the data, I had the realization that I didn't even care about this problem. It was hard to imagine myself grinding away at this. Heck, it was hard imagining myself spending enough money to reach some form of statistical significance.

Lessons: Validation works. Some commodity markets are real grinds. Validation can give you information that you didn't expect.