When do you consider your idea validated?
These days, I can only work on my projects on weekends as I have more obligations but that works for me.
Anyhow, sometimes I randomly get a paying customer and i'm unsure if it truly means the idea is validated.
The other strangest thing is that I haven't done any advertising in many many months so i'm not even sure where these users are coming from. I check G-Analytics and I see up to 100+ users a week and a thousand a month but I haven't posted about the project in more than half a year.
Once again, I got a new subscriber the other day and I tried to reach out to them asking what they like and where they came from, but after 2 weeks; still no response.
Should I consider my apps validated because of no marketing but random paying customers (small amount of paying customers between 2 of my projects)?
I think it might be worth thinking about what you're looking for here. If I say "yes, this means your idea is validated", what then? Would anything change? Are you looking to use "is it validated" as a reason to try to dedicate more time to it?
To answer your question: When you have paying customers, your idea is validated - somebody sees enough value in it to pay for it. That says nothing about the size of the market though, or anything else. Just that it does solve a real problem that someone somewhere cares enough about to pay for it.
"Are you looking to use "is it validated" as a reason to try to dedicate more time to it?"
Yes, that's pretty much the case. I figure if your product is validated then it means it makes more sense to continue investing time into it rather than jumping ship.
"That says nothing about the size of the market though, or anything else. ".
This pretty much answers my question so I appreciate you including the second part of your answer. Determining the market size it seems is quite important and a few users does not capture the ceiling of that market.
Thank you