The process we use to validate ideas

I've seen a few threads on here from people asking about how you should validate ideas. We've all heard about 'The Mom Test' and the importance of talking to users, but there isn't much info on the process you should follow.

I thought I'd share an overview of the process we're using at Zorbi

Our weekly flow goes something like this:

• Write out assumptions about product/market (what 'we think')
• Test these hypotheses through the customer discovery process
• On Sunday: I write a customer development update for the team outlining what we thought, what we found, and what we're going to do (next week's assumptions)

The purpose of this flow is an effort to get us closer to the elusive product-market fit. This process is borrowed more from 'startup' ideologies but I think the general ideology applies to IndieHacking as well.

What is Customer Development?

The Customer Development Process is one of the only well-tested frameworks for building a successful 'startup'.

Like most ex?-wantrepreneurs, I was first exposed to the world of 'startups' through YCombinator videos and the famous book by Eric Ries, The Lean Startup.

What most people don't know is that the Lean Startup movement was preceded by Steve Blank and Bob Dorf's ideologies on Customer Development.

The process contains four stages:

• Customer Discovery: Creating hypotheses and testing them with customers (get out of the building!)
• Customer Validation: Test willingness to buy and scalability
• Customer Creation: Testing distribution (marketing)
• Company Building: 🤷‍♂️ Building the company

In reality, the entire process can be summed up in one statement:

Winners recognize their startup is a series of untested hypotheses.

Founders need to get out of the building and gain a deep and personal understanding of their potential customers' needs first. It's easy to forget this fact and I've even made the mistake in the past month. But it's a crucial point... See Steve and Bob's statement from their book: "That's the difference between winners and losers."

Search: Customer Discovery

You'll start with assumptions about customers and this is where you should try and ignore those assumptions.

Instead, you want to gain an understanding of who your customers are and the problems they're facing daily.

Your goal during this stage is to figure out what MVP (problem/solution fit) you can build for a small target market (your earlyvangelists).

During this stage we go through four phases repeatedly:

• Building a rough business model with a Lean Canvas (nine sections = nine assumptions)
• Conducting experiments to test and understand the problem
• Testing the solution (e.g. measuring conversions on a landing page)
• A reflection on the results of the experiments

We can only move onto customer validation if we think we have:

• a full understanding of the customer problems and needs
• confirmed that the value props solve the problems and needs
• confirmed it's a viable business (funny how important this becomes when it's not a side-project)
• we know that customers will pay and that the revenue will sustain a business

(Move on when you know you've learned enough about your customers)

Search: Customer Validation

This stage is about testing if the product can actually sell.

At Zorbi, we've already made the mistake of entering this stage too early once. But it's not that big of a deal since you'll fail out of this stage and be back in customer discovery in no time. The key part is learning from that.

Be critical of every area in your lean canvas.

I'm not adding too much info here (see the section below) but it basically consists of four phases:

• Building a Hi-Fi MVP, positioning your product, setting up some analytics.
• "Going live" and getting out of your building. Trying to actually get customers who want to buy or use the product. (More than just a handful)
• Refining the "Get" part of your customer acquisition channel. Use metrics and customer feedback to measure the effectiveness of your acquisition strategies
• Pausing all activity and analyzing whether "this business is worth doing" - is it worth years of work?

Customer validation is over when it's clear that there are real orders, users, and clicks - not surveys or chats. Your epiphany moment is when:

• you know that your customers will accept your MVP.
• you know that the customers exist
• you know that you can reach them predictably
• you have a scalable plan to engage them and sell to them

Search for your epiphany moment.

Execution Stages

I'm not going to waste any time writing about this section when I'm not there yet.

And it shouldn't matter. It's important to stop focusing on stages that don't matter to you. Does it really matter how Facebook broke past their ceiling of 80 million users? Does it matter how Segment grew past their 100 million valuation?

I've done my fair share of reading entrepreneurship porn - don't make the same mistakes.

Stop learning and start building.

More on Customer Development

If you want to learn the basics then you should start with the YCombinator Startup School and The Lean Startup by Eric Ries.

Eric Ries's book should give you an abstract overview of the lean startup movement.

You can't do much with just that abstract overview. Check out the "sequel", The Lean Product Playbook by Dan Olsen. Dan's book should give you practical tools and case studies showing you how to execute that process.

And you'll want to check out the prequel as well: The Startup Owner's Manual by Steve Blank and Bob Dorf.

Note: The prequel and sequel aren't meant for reading - they are reference books, treat them like textbooks.

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If you made it this far then here's a reminder for both of us: There is no perfect roadmap for building a company. The best we have are outlines that other startups have successfully used in the past.

Thanks for reading - this is my first time posting here so let me know what you think. And if you want to continue learning from my mistakes then feel free to subscribe to my blog.