Let me share my failed startup story: if only I thought it through

Last year, I messed up.

I wasted the first 6 months of Toasty with an 8-people team to realize that we were working on a terrible idea.

After we interviewed users and discovered a problem, we built the product. We worked with a number of partners, then ......6 months in, I decided we had to pivot.

What went wrong? I found out a few things about our business model back then (this is the list - I broke each one down in details on my blog):

• Sales cycle is long
  
• Frequency of usage is super low
• Buyers and users are not the same people
• Zero viral effect
• One-off payment term
• Market size is small
• Matchmaking is not top of the organizer’s mind
  
• Willingness to pay
• Non-existent feedback loop

If only had I validated the idea a bit more before we started building, we could have done ourselves a big favor.

This is why I wrote a blog post to reflect and remind myself.

More importantly, it is because I've been a big fan of talking to people (running user interviews), but I realized I missed one more step before that: we should have researched more and validated a few more data points ourselves. If we had done that, we didn't even need to get to user interviews!

We got angel funding for Toasty, so we had to go for high growth. We couldn't afford to slowly build up. In hindsight, I worked on the wrong idea for this objective.

I took this painful lesson and came up with 8 questions to challenge my future ideas, so I won't make the same mistake. It is definitely not a guarantee, but it is important to think through them.

The questions:

• Is my idea part of a global trend?
• Is the product easy to use? Can users self-onboard?
• Is it easy for people to tell their colleagues or friends? Can they try it out immediately?
  and then 5 more.

I'll share the link to the blog post here if you'd like the entire story: https://kevoncheung.com/validating-startup-ideas

I hope this is helpful to a few other first-time founders when they're early in their ideation phase. Of course, it is different for everyone, so just take it as a reference.