Most of the projects that reach us don't fail because the product is poorly built. They fail because it was built before anyone knew whether people wanted it. Validating isn't slowing down: it's spending two weeks instead of six months to learn the same thing.
What validating actually means
Validating means writing down the three or four beliefs the whole idea rests on, and then looking for the evidence that breaks them. Not the evidence that confirms them — that is always easy to find.
- There is a real problem, and the people living it describe it in their own words.
- Those people are willing to pay, or change habits, to solve it.
- We can reach them through a channel we can sustain.
- The numbers still work once you remove the optimism.
How we do it
We start with ten conversations with people who have the problem. We don't pitch the idea: we ask how they cope today, how much time they lose, what they have already tried. Then we build the smallest possible proof — a landing page, a mock quote, a pilot in one department — and watch what happens.
If after ten conversations nobody asks when it will be ready, the pitch isn't the problem.
The go/no-go moment
Validation ends with an explicit decision: go on, change direction, or stop. Writing it down with the numbers behind it is the part almost nobody does — and it's the part that saves you six months later, when the project gets complicated and nobody remembers why it started.
Want the tools we use? Download the canvases or look at our paths.