Idea Validation Playbooks
How founders pressure-test an idea before building it — the demand signals worth chasing, the cheap experiments that surface real intent, and the traps that waste months. Every tactic below is quoted directly from a founder podcast and linked to its source.
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“I downloaded some cursor things and then I discovered this common pattern about rules so it was kind of mind-blowing for me that there were no place to find these rules in one specific place. You could Google and find some obscure gist on GitHub or some forums but no real clear answer.”
Spot Directory Opportunities In Your Own Frustration When No Central Place Exists
Pontus spotted the opportunity by being a user himself, downloading tutorials on a flight and noticing rules kept appearing without a central home. The validation signal was his own frustration multiplied by the obscurity of existing answers (gists, forums) for a fast-growing tool. The market gap was already screaming.
“We started with a newsletter that validated the initial traction then with a no code app at the time that validated the product market fit and then a real app that I've developed to really scale.”
De-Risk Validation With A Newsletter, Then A No-Code App, Then The Real App
Loick's repeatable playbook follows three escalating commitment steps: a newsletter to prove people care, a no-code app to prove they will use it, then a real engineered app to scale. He used this exact sequence on Infuspy, Mania, and Drop Magic — each hit $35K+ MRR in their first month using the same ladder.
“Step one would be to solve a problem within your hobby so solving a problem within your hobby is a very effective strategy because you already understand and enjoy the activity and this makes it much easier to solve problems other people will most likely experience too.”
Solve A Tiny Problem Inside Your Own Hobby So You Ship With Built-In Beta Testers
Ethan picked combat-sport weight cutting because he was a national wrestling champion who personally suffered through the problem. Building inside your hobby gives you instant domain expertise, a beta audience (his wrestling club), and the empathy to redesign the product when v1 missed. Outsiders can't fake that.
“Go look at the one and two star reviews and see what people are complaining about. See what they dislike about the best players in the market. That's our twist. Our twist is what people dislike about the biggest companies in the space because those are the easiest customers to go after and acquire.”
Skip Invention And Differentiate By Mining The One- And Two-Star Reviews Of The Market Leader
Will's framework starts with markets that already have product-market fit, then differentiates by mining one- and two-star reviews of the dominant player. Signaturely beat DocuSign by being 'so easy to use your grandmother could use it,' targeting the exact complaints incumbents ignored. The frustrated reviewers become your easiest customers.
“We didn't really start with the app we started with content... if we weren't just making that content for fun we never would have discovered what was going viral and what content was going to work which ideas actually resonated with people so we started with the content first... once we saw what went viral then we built the app so we basically reverse engineered the content into the app”
Validate With Content First, Then Reverse-Engineer The App From The Viral Hits
Jack and Nick built Coherence by posting content about breath work and esoteric topics before writing any code. They used viral signal as proof of demand, then reverse-engineered the app from the ideas that resonated.
“step one do your niche research before you even start coding because you need to find proofs proof that you have competitors on Tik Tok and proof that these competitors have viral videos on Tik Tok as well tik Tok search is your best friend and creator search insights also on Tik Tok is your best friend too”
Prove Competitors Have Viral TikTok Videos Before You Write Any Code
Their first validation step happened entirely on TikTok, not in a spreadsheet. They required two proofs before coding: competitors exist in the niche, and those competitors have viral videos — using TikTok search and Creator Search Insights as the only research tools.
“A video with 10,000 views that somehow hits the pocket of viewers that love your product and they're immediately evangelized I would say that is like very viral and you did a good job of creating content that was able to go viral in this pocket with this community that's worth infinitely more than a viral video that got a million views but it's a lukewarm meme.”
Real Virality Is Infecting The Right Pocket, Not Chasing View Counts
David redefines virality as resonance with the right pocket of viewers, not raw view counts. A 10,000-view video that evangelizes the right community beats a million-view lukewarm meme every time.
“we're going to pull out our phones we're going to go to Tik Tok and type in any keywords related to our niche and then what you can do tap the three dots in the top right and then you can filter by most liked videos of all time this is your market research”
Mine Most-Liked-Of-All-Time TikToks In Your Niche As Your Market Research
Steven validates app ideas by searching niche keywords on TikTok and filtering for most-liked videos of all time. Those viral hits prove a problem is painful, controversial, and audience-resonant before any code is written.
“before I posted a single video on the Puff Count Tik Tok I scrolled for 7 days straight i saved all the videos to the market research just like this and after 7 days of scrolling analyzing and understanding what goes viral in your niche and why it goes viral in your niche you will be so much better at creating content”
Scroll Your Niche For Seven Straight Days Before Posting A Single Video
Before publishing anything on the Puff Count TikTok, Steven spent seven straight days scrolling the niche and saving viral videos into a research spreadsheet. That immersion taught him exactly what hooks, storylines, and CTAs resonate before he risked his own time creating.
“the best way to sort of work out what apps can be created is just a simp live life go out there and then try to work out where there's a need for an app or where there are apps that aren't doing a good enough job and that's where all of my Inspirations come from”
Just Live Your Life And Watch For Apps Doing A Bad Job Of Their One Thing
Adam rejects starting from a money motive when picking app ideas. Instead he just lives his life and watches for real needs or apps doing a poor job, which is how every one of his inspirations has surfaced.
“I started with like this blue ocean idea because no one was on it. I thought I had like an incredible tech that was going to change the world. In the end it was like too complex and it didn't work out. So now I was like okay red ocean we have tons of competitors but if we have competitors it means that there is always a product market fit.”
Pick A Red Ocean Where Competitors Have Already Proven The Market Pays
Guillaume's first 'blue ocean' bet collapsed when LinkedIn changed one line of code. He pivoted to a crowded red ocean on purpose, reasoning that competitors making money was the cleanest proof of product-market fit.
“my first business idea lasted about 3 weeks until I realized I was building something because someone told me it could make money online I had no passion for the idea and no skills that would help me build it and that's when I went back to the drawing board and looked for an idea that only I could build”
Build The Idea That Only You Could Build, Not What Others Say Makes Money
Pat's first attempt at a business failed within three weeks because he was chasing someone else's recipe for online income. He restarted by hunting for an idea that aligned with his own skills, passions, and a path to revenue, which is how Starter Story was born.
“I would sample them around to like all of my co-workers at Hulu so like my managers other people in the finance team my manager was like yo mother eer he was like I was up till 3:00 a.m. I couldn't sleep and I was like that's me I was like so the product works”
Validate The Formula By Handing Samples To Your Coworkers
Ryan validated his energy gum formula by handing samples to coworkers at Hulu, including his manager. When his manager reported being wired until 3am, Ryan knew the product actually worked before they ever invested in scaling.
“My idea at the time was to download and try existing apps and I noticed a common theme in the user reviews that there was this gap when it came to identifying what a panic attack is and also solutions for how to basically get through a panic attack in the moment.”
Mine Competitor App-Store Reviews For The Same Unmet Need Repeated Over And Over
Anya validated Rooted by downloading every existing panic-attack app and mining the user reviews for unmet needs. The recurring complaint — no clear explanation of what a panic attack is or how to stop one in the moment — became the wedge for her MVP.
“I put together a really early version of Rooted a prototype an MVP type solution and the first few hundred users said that even though there was still some lagging some bugs some incomplete parts they really wanted me to keep going with it and that was super encouraging.”
A Few Hundred Users Saying "Keep Going" Despite Bugs Is The Signal To Commit
Anya launched a buggy, incomplete prototype rather than waiting for polish. The first few hundred users telling her to keep going, despite the rough edges, was the signal she needed to push past the naysayers and commit.
“I'm building it for people that are in a video production industry where are they where do they hang out I'm looking for a subreddit it took me quite a while to actually find one these are quite hidden these are very small niche stuff and I think you know what let me post it here so I put a link in here and I say Hey try it out give me some feedback what do you think is this useful to you?”
Validate On A Hidden Niche Subreddit With A Free Link And No Price
Lucas validated his timer app by hunting down a small, hidden video-production subreddit and posting a single 'try it out and give feedback' link with no price attached. Removing the pricing signal made it feel like genuine feedback-seeking rather than a sales pitch, and his rule was always one post per subreddit, never spam.
“If I had set my goal 6 years ago to have 150k a year I would thrown away that project. So my first goal was not to get the million dollars but to have a random person who I don't know download the app. Since it was a side project monetization can come afterwards. Users first monetization later.”
Pick A Tiny Early Goal — Users First, Monetization Later — Or You Will Quit
Chris says picking the wrong goal would have killed the project early. Instead of chasing revenue, his first milestone was a single stranger downloading the app, which kept the bar low enough to keep shipping for years.
“Social media is noisy, it's oversaturated and while organic reach is dead for most businesses... there are people that are actively searching for social media scheduling API or Twitter automation tool that have a 10x higher intent to buy. We are actually here capturing the intent that already exists rather than trying to create it through viral content.”
Capture Existing Search Intent Instead Of Manufacturing Demand With Viral Content
Mickey rejected social media as a channel because organic reach is dead and content competes for low-intent attention. Instead, he targets people actively searching for terms like 'social media scheduling API,' arguing that captured intent converts roughly 10x better than manufactured demand.
“I'd been building a lot for Emma which is this archetype that I had in my head who's my little sister. She was entering college as a first year civil engineering major and we were thinking a lot about how can we summarize things help people learn.”
Build for one real person — Zack's sister Emma, civil engineering major
Zack grounded every product decision in a single concrete person: his sister Emma starting civil engineering. Building for one real human instead of a fuzzy demographic sharpens every trade-off, especially when you can text her after a release and ask what she thinks.
“There's this app called Breezy. She just makes founder-led content talking about the app itself, showing Figma screenshots, some beta screenshots, and then it's a waitlist. She made a video that was 15 seconds long just talking about the app and got I think 5,000 waitlist signups.”
Breezy got 5,000 waitlist signups from one 15-second Figma-screenshot video
Breezy, a social note-sharing app aimed at Gen Z, drove ~5,000 waitlist signups from one 15-second founder-led TikTok showing only Figma and beta screenshots. Use TikTok as instant product validation: if a video about the concept pulls views and signups, you have demand signal before writing code.
“JJ Allaire was tracking his calories in an Excel sheet and thought 'well I could be doing this better on this new fancy handheld device called the iPhone' and he built the very first version of Lose It, put it up on the App Store. The email inbox started getting flooded with people saying 'this app is amazing it's helping me lose weight' — kind of realized like oh I have a product, I have a company here.”
Excel-tracking founder shipped v1 — inbox flooded with testimonials proved demand
Lose It! founder JJ Allaire scratched his own itch by replacing an Excel calorie tracker with an iPhone app at the dawn of the App Store. The contact email he was forced to provide for submission immediately filled with unsolicited 'I'm losing weight' testimonials — that's how he realized he had a product worth building a company around.
“What an early stage app team needs to work on is product-market fit, whether they think they do or not. They're probably two or three years away from product-market fit. That means they need to iterate on the product and they need to iterate on the marketing and meet there somewhere in the middle.”
Most early-stage apps are 2-3 years from product-market fit
Andy refuses early-stage clients at Phiture because they arrive thinking they're ready for hyper-growth and almost never are (Flappy Bird is the rare exception). The honest expectation: years of product and marketing iteration until the retention curve flattens, not weeks of growth hacks.
“It all starts with understanding the user journey, and understanding users probably better than you currently do. That for me always starts with asking them questions rather than diving straight into the analytics and looking at funnels.”
Interview users before you open the analytics dashboard
Tech teams default to dashboards because the data is there. Andy's instinct flip: quant tells you what users do, but qualitative interviews surface what they're thinking, hoping, and expecting at each touchpoint — the why behind funnel drop-offs that analytics alone won't explain.
“Let's say we're a golf company and you say there's 50 million golfers in the US, that's our TAM. You'll find pretty quickly that there aren't 50 million golfers who play golf on a frequent basis, maybe 20 million. You're omitting a key factor which is commitment.”
Commitment is the variable founders forget — 50M golfers ≠ 50M subscribers
For subscription products the gating variable isn't whether someone fits the category — it's how committed they are. Surfline doesn't care how many people have surfed once; it cares how many surf often enough to pay. Cut your TAM by commitment frequency before you model anything.
“The market research you find out there is typically just going to be very high level and you're going to have to cut it down. If you have great analytics on your platform you can learn enough about your consumers to figure out what segmentation actually matters — like what your SAM should be.”
Triangulate real SAM from your own product analytics, not market research
Don't trust top-line market research alone. Combine it with your own analytics on who actually uses and pays, then segment by the variables (geography, demo, commitment) that meaningfully change serviceability. SAM is triangulated, not looked up.
“I ran to the nursery and I bought like 30 plants because I was like I need to have the problem in order to be deeply motivated to solve it — because if you actually have over 10 plants, keeping track of them kind of sucks.”
Buy 30 plants to make sure you actually have the problem you're solving
Alex deliberately bought 30 plants at the start of COVID to ensure he and the team felt the pain they were solving. Being your own user kept motivation real and grounded the prototype in actual need — founders without an authentic version of the user's pain ship for demos, not retention.
“Home Depot is a publicly traded company so you can look up their annual statements. They make more money on indoor garden than on any other product segment — more than lumber, paint, appliances. Roughly 11 billion dollars per year.”
Validate market with Home Depot's public filings — $11B indoor garden
Before committing to the plant space, Alex pulled Home Depot's 10-K to confirm indoor garden was their top revenue segment ($11B/yr) and sized the broader US plant retail market at ~$100B. Public filings are a cheap, hard-numbers validation step most founders skip in favor of TAM-on-vibes.
“When people decide to go through and cancel their subscription, you automatically trigger some kind of several-question survey with main categories for the reasons they're done. That can be really helpful in sizing and directing your churn-prevention efforts in the future and win-back efforts that follow.”
Cancellation surveys size your churn-prevention efforts
Auto-trigger a short multiple-choice survey at the moment of cancellation. The data sizes each churn reason and tells you where retention and win-back work should be concentrated — without it, you're guessing at every save offer and re-engagement campaign.
“It's a good idea to just do some interviews with churning users and understand more deeply what the story is behind things, and then create your categories from there. If you create those predetermined buckets out of nowhere, you might be missing significant cuts that you want to be able to track over time.”
Interview churners BEFORE locking in your cancel-survey buckets
Don't ship a cancel survey with buckets pulled from a brainstorm. Run qualitative interviews with churners first, then turn what you actually hear into the predefined options — otherwise your segments will hide the very reasons you most need to act on. Re-open the text field periodically to catch new failure modes.
“I have not met a more committed passionate group of people than surfers. These are people waking up at 4 in the morning to drive 2 hours away to catch a swell window of an hour and go surfing, then going to work after that — sitting in a 5-mil wetsuit in 55-degree water for a couple hours. Commitment level super high.”
Validate niche commitment, not just market size — surfers wake at 4am for a 1-hour swell
For niche products, validating commitment matters more than headline market size. High commitment plus a strong value prop is what makes premium pricing viable even when conventional wisdom (surfers are cheap, golfers are cheap) suggests otherwise. Measure how far your users will go to use the product, not how many of them exist.