Ask HN: How to Validate Startup Ideas
If you are a founder who launched a startup product, I would love to hear from you. In my next post, I am writing about "How to validate startup ideas". I'm reaching out to founders to help me answer some questions.
You can answer here on DM on Twitter @helghardt.
1. How did you decide what to work on in the beginning?
2. Were you solving your own problem? If not, what did you do to better understand the problem/domain?
3. Looking back what was the high-level process/steps to validate your startup idea? How long did each phase take?
4. Did the thing you originally set out to work on change? In what way?
5. What approach did you use for defining your target customer?
6. How did you find and engage with your target customer?
7. What did you measure to help you validate the value proposition?
8. How much of your validation was a gut feeling vs. actual data?
9. Did you create what customers asked, or did you land on a need that customers didn’t even know they wanted?
10. How did you approach validating your growth thesis? 11. What tools did you use, how long did it take, what worked?
12. How long did it take to validate your startup idea altogether?
13. In hindsight, what do you think could have helped you to save time?
14. What tools did you use in the process of validating your startup idea?
15. Did you build anything to help you validate your startup idea by getting early user feedback? How much time did you spend on your early MVPs before getting it in the hands of potential customers?
16. What was your biggest hurdle in validating your startup idea?
17. What aspects of the startup validation phase did you automate? If you did it now, what would you consider to automate?
18. What did you do in the startup validation phase that you think is outside of the typical advice?
19. What did you do in the process to validate your startup idea that you believe an AI would never have been able to do?
If you have any suggestions on questions that I should add or tweak, please drop a comment.