You don't need to validate your ideas!

Jason Fried, the founder of Basecamp, says "You can't validate anything by asking about ideas... You validate something by believing in it, you build it, you put it out there, and that's when it's validated or not."

This message seems to debunk the whole premise of the Lean Startup movement. The core idea of the Lean Startup is validated learning, through iteratively building the absolute minimum before measuring and learning in order to validate your idea before committing to full scale product development.

In his recent rant on twitter, Jason Fried shared a video in response to the following question: "How do you discover and validate your ideas and how do you assess if an idea is worth executing?" (see link at end of this post)

Jason responds by saying "I hate [it] when people talk about validation... you cannot validate an idea! An idea doesn't exist, you cannot validate something that doesn't exist. You have to make the thing, and the market will 'validate' it. Until you do that, you have no idea."

It seems as if he is suggesting that trying to validate your idea as a first step is a waste of time, and we should just jump straight to building products. However, we have actual stories of other entrepreneurs successfully executing idea validation before building anything at all, which contradicts Jason's claims.

Take for example, Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic. It is believed that around 600 tickets have been sold for a price ranging between $200,000 and $250,000. That's a top-end pre-sales estimate of approximately $150m. Virgin Galactic hadn't built any spaceships when they sold those tickets. So, they hadn't built anything right? Entrepreneurs on the platform Kick Starter, are selling an idea of a product, a movie etc that does not exist either. But, is this really true? Is it possible to validate an idea without building anything? Not quite, let me explain.

In the above examples, entrepreneurs have built something. They haven't built a product, and in some cases, they haven't even built a prototype, but they have built an offer! They have built the offer of something that can solve a customer's problem or fulfil a customer desire. It is this offer that they are testing in the marketplace, with potential customers.

However, an offer alone won't translate into sales, you also have to build trust. Customers need to trust that you can deliver your offer, if they don't, they won't buy. This is why when we are trying to validate our ideas, we start by identifying our early adopters. These customers have problems that are so acute, that they are willing to take a risk. These early adopters are quite often people we know, or have engaged with frequently. Perhaps through reading your blog, having purchased something from you before or they are someone you already know.

It's through the creation of offers that we get our first opportunity to validate our ideas, and building them is much faster than building actual products.

The real issue for entrepreneurs is not even that their ideas might fail, it's that they only have a limited amount of time to find the one idea that has the potential to succeed. Therefore, building the minimum thing possible, and asking your early adopters to validate it, is the best approach to cycle through lots of ideas until you find the one that has a chance of succeeding. Time is our scarcest resource, and we can't waste it.

Later In his rant, Jason goes on to say: "I think that what's behind all of this, is that people want to be certain. You cannot be certain of anything. The only way to know if you're on the right track really, is to build the thing put it out there and see what happens."

He hits the nail on the head. There is no certainty in an idea alone. We have to be able to make it real and tangible in some form, then convince customers that you can deliver it by building trust. There is still no certainty that convincing a few customers will lead to convincing lots of them, but incrementally, step by step, building and testing more of your idea will help you reduce waste and preserve time. It is the preservation of time, through the elimination of waste that is at the core of the Lean Startup method.

I offer Indie Hackers FREE 1:1 WEEKLY coaching to help validate their ideas.
Book here (no sales) : https://calendly.com/startup-success/lean-startup-1-1

Link to Jason Fried's tweet: https://twitter.com/jasonfried/status/1337095209620946944