Idea validation from your parents and other family members

I've been lucky enough to have very supportive and optimistic parents who think it every I do will succeed. I've proven them wrong on numerous occasions ;-)

One thing I will say is that every business has challenges that need to be overcome or avoided. Often, founders are naively optimistic and don't notice these challenges, whereas friends, family, and colleagues will swing in the opposite direction and list these challenges as reasons why your business can't succeed. The truth is between.

Building a successful business is largely a matter of identifying obstacles and tackling them, so your critical friends and family can be quite useful at helping with the first part.

Parents are notorious for dishing out advice without realizing they have no knowledge (worldly or domain specific) on the topic matter. Having said that, if my folks were Gates or Zuckerberg (or someone who has built an inter generational business), I’d probably shut up and listen as they’re likely to understand the nuances of starting up, building a team and business, and scaling it. Also be wary of advice from those who’ve only known how to take home a pay cheque. Entrepreneurship requires a different mind set. Hence, IH and the people we find here.

They're just trying to talk you into lowering your valuation so they can get more equity! ;-)

Consider whether you'd normally ask a person like your mom, if the person wasn't your mom - Is she in your target audience? Is she an experienced businesswomen in the space you are trying to explore? Can she give you potential customer feedback or mentor advice? If not, consider her advice the same way as you'd treat any other non-customer, non-mentor comment ...

I love my wife, parents and my brother. But they're not experienced in the tech world and into tech startups etc.

I always talk about my ideas but they don't get it. I use their feedback to see if there are relevant issues that can be tackled.
I learned not to take their feedback personal (although they're trying to help me as a person) and listen objectively to what they're saying.

Often they reflect on the caveats that are in my own personality and how that could conflict with me reaching my goals. That's good to embrace and act upon as we tend to focus on how good an idea is technically most of the time, but self-reflection (is this doable by me, is this something I'm​ really into?) needs to be evaluated, too.

Not my projects but investments. I have been giving my dad investment advice for 9 years now, the list includes Tesla the year of their IPO, Amazon in 2016, and a few others. But, understandably, he's very conservative with his investments so he didn't invested in any of them. Now he knows if I constantly talk about something he should invest.

My advice is to try to explain the process and the ins and outs of your project in simplest terms and the progress. Talk about how you're marketing your store and all your sales.

Also, I'd love to hear more about your store!!

and that one got into YC and is still going today.

First of all, nice.

If you want us to give an unbiased assessment of it, though, why not just tell us about your idea?

Really depends on where and how the advice is coming from. That is, do they have domain expertise. Is their input valid?

Sometimes, the more risk-averse input is still spot-on as to the challenges -- good to know if you're going to tackle the idea anyways.

Also, there's a short book that touches on how to ask better questions -- customer discovery -- called, aptly, "The Mom Test". Takes a couple hours to read.

Though there are some grammatical errors that normally keeps me from reading a book, the content and question-asking methodology was good.

In all honesty - unless your parents are from web-oriented business family, you should keep them out of your business.
Doing web business is difficult to understand for "offline" folk. They will try to look at your ideas and business through their brick and mortar glasses.
I have been in this business for a decade and the majority of people that succeed says the same - it is lonely.
At best you will get a silent acceptance.
For your family to validate your idea is to see when you will be making a multiple of what you would be making at the day job. Until you do that, they will treat is a risky hobby, stupid idea, failure or will keep distance at best.
Obviously, each family is different, but I heard those stories so many times, that above seems almost universal.

I’m quite lucky in that my mum will believe in anything I put my hand to, sometimes I pitch her the most rediculous of ideas (like a mini lawnmower trailer for cats so they can mow your lawn for you) just to see if she bites.

It’s my partner I have to worry about. I’ll excitedly pitch her my ideas and she’ll immediately have a dozen reasons why it won’t work. But that’s just what you need, someone to challenge you on why it will work, I find it helps to filter out the bad ideas and discover the challenges you’ll likely stumble upon, much, much earlier.

Plus I always like to prove her wrong ;)

Have any of you had parents that discouraged your idea and it turned into something you were proud to build? And vice versa, did you build something and your parents' advice was spot on.

I think you answered your own question:

she had objections to my last startup and that one got into YC and is still going today.

This comment was deleted 5 years ago

This comment was deleted 7 years ago