Validation Before Perfection: Why it is mandatory to validate the IDEA

“The value of an idea lies in the using of it”

Thomas Edison

The Story of the Unvalidated Perfect Platform

I learned this lesson the hard way, from my mistake with a platform we called Grobyk (GROwing BY Knowing). Grobyk was a platform for building team knowledge bases, where you could share articles, POCs (Proof Of Concept) and other related notes to keep your team up to date with the latest concepts in your field. The idea came from our need. My co-founders and I found ourselves reading the same articles on our lunch breaks, but never getting the chance to share, discuss, and build on the concepts we found. So we came up with this idea of Grobyk. We spent a year building the platform using only our intuition, without gathering any feedback from the market, without thinking who should be our customer profile. The platform ended up failing when we tried to find the product-market fit.

Opinion

Our desire as programmers drove us to write code and built Grobyk with tons of features, most of them unused. That’s shit after you realize that nobody wants to use it, that you spent so much time on it, and you thought that it was cool, and others will use it. This is why you need to validate the idea. It will save you valuable time and you can build something from the beginning with a customer in mind. Find the person who will give you money to use your product.

Find Your Validation

In the beginning, you can spend less time doing the actual software/hardware part and more time finding your dream customers. You should go outside, on social groups, ask your friends, find someone that it may be interested and tell him: we made this, what do you think? In the beginning, yes, it sucks. It has a lot of bugs, but if someone is interested in it, they will keep an eye on your progress. “We made it better, we added new cool stuff” email and it will try again to see the product. This transparency is refreshing to customers and helpful to programmers.

It is better to create something on a base of customers then building something with your intuition and then see if you find someone that is interested in it. It shouldn’t need to be 10k initial base customers; it should be 50–100 clients who at least have a problem near what you are trying to solve.

I’ve seen it, I felt it on my skin, so don’t waste your time creating intuition, start creating facts.

Photo source — https://pixabay.com