The "10 people" rule for killing ideas fast

I used to validate ideas by doing market research, looking at competitors, estimating TAM. All useful stuff. But I kept building things that looked good on paper and died on launch.

The missing piece was stupid simple: post the idea publicly and count who reaches out without being asked.

Here's what I do now:

1. Run desk research first (automated, takes an hour, costs nothing)
2. If the numbers look decent, post the raw idea on X/LinkedIn/Reddit
3. Wait a week
4. Count unprompted responses

The threshold: 10 people reaching out on their own. Not likes. Not "cool idea" comments. Actual DMs, people tagging friends, replies describing their workaround for the problem.

Killed 2 ideas this way. None hit 10.

Why unprompted matters:

If you ask "would you use this?" people say yes to be nice. If someone DMs you without being asked, they actually have the problem. That's a completely different signal.

The other thing that changed my approach: channel focus.

I was doing the classic indie hacker thing of posting everywhere, trying SEO, cold outreach, social, all at once. Getting mediocre results across the board.

Now I test 3 channels for 60 days, measure which one drives actual revenue (not traffic, not followers), and kill the bottom 2. Then I pour everything into the winner.

Tibo talked about this recently. SEO was the winner for Revid, affiliates for Outrank, social for SuperX. Different product, different winner every time. You have to test it, you can't guess.

One more thing for the first 5-10 users:

Set up the product for them yourself. Don't just give them access. Configure it, customize it for their business, walk them through it. Yes it's manual. Yes it doesn't scale. But those early users become advocates and you learn exactly where the product breaks.

I stopped doing it after 10 users. By then the patterns were clear enough to productize the onboarding.

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All of this is in my distribution playbook (beyondfolder.com/distribution) if you want AI to apply the full system to your product.

I'm a developer who spent a decade avoiding sales and marketing, so everything in there comes from actually figuring it out with real numbers, not theory.