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):
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:
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.
Thanks for writing this up Kevon.
You're welcome! Failing in public is embarrassing but sharing the story to help other hustling founders make it less so.
Good read Kevon.
One thing crossed my mind though, these seem to be super appropriate to a B2C and a B2B where the receiving B is a tech/partial tech group. When it comes a case where the receiving B is a non-tech group, it gets even more difficult :)
You're right, when I wrote this, in my mind, I was thinking about B2B SaaS ideas (because this is what we aimed for & pivoted to), for other startup ideas the founders might have to ask a few different questions. Thanks for pointing this out!