How to Validate a Business Idea Before Spending Money.

When you have a business idea, you get excited. It makes perfect sense. You KNOW that people would buy it. Problem is, it could be a weak assumption. And if you’re going to bet your hard earned savings, inventory, and a few months of your life on an idea, you’d better be sure that you’re solving a problem that’s worth it. Rather than ask your friends “is this a good idea?” just watch how people are trying to solve the problem already. Look for complaints in forum posts, reviews, and other conversations that recur with the same words. If you see the same problem repeated over and over, and if they are using emotion words or long, explanatory sentences to describe it, then you know you’ve got something worth solving.

Try practicing the one-sentence version of the idea. Try to express it in one sentence as a result, not a list of features. “This app helps local cafes figure out ways to reduce the number of unsold pastries they have at the end of the day” is more powerful than “this app lets you do A, B, and C.” When you think you have it, try running through it in a low-stakes way with a few random people who fit the proposed use case. You’re not trying to sell them on the idea, but trying to get them to tell you how they already solve the problem. What do they like about their current solution and what’s frustrating about it? If the response is “That sounds cool. I’d use that” then you haven’t defined a very sharp problem.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of building things quickly because doing so often feels like progress. Creating an early prototype, website, or package design can lead to emotional attachment, making it more difficult to kill a bad idea. Instead, gauge interest by exerting minimal effort: Describe it and then ask if they would be interested in being notified when such a thing was available. If they hesitate, express mild curiosity, or keep saying “maybe later,” go back to the drawing board instead of proceeding with the original plan.

If you only have 15 minutes, try this exercise: Take 5 minutes to write down the problem in your everyday language. Then take 5 minutes to do a search for how frequently that problem arises in everyday conversation. Finally, take 5 minutes to write down the ways in which the current solutions aren’t perfect. Repeating this exercise every day will help you hone your sense of what problems may be valuable to solve. After some days, you will notice that some problems seem to be urgently searched for, and others may be all hypothetical.

If you get stuck, reduce the scope, not increase it. Concepts such as “aid small businesses” are hard to test, having too many components. Picking a specific use case such as “independent bookstores that have trouble filling events” will yield more direct feedback. It is important to have this defined as early as possible. Not only does it save time, but will help you develop the necessary constraint to evolve a “cool idea” into a startup based on a real problem rather than an imagined one.