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Comment by jjguy | Hacker News Reader

People spend money to solve problems. If the problem you solve is not clearly defined, you cannot define your customers and cannot target your marketing.

The validation you need might be "that's cool!" The validation your company needs is "that solves my problem."

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Very true, and you're right that these are totally different forms of validation. It's a steep learning curve (for me), but I figured this particular blind spot may be encountered by some (definitely not all) other tech folks on this path.

I reached out to my ideal customer and told them I have an idea to solve a problem of theirs. They said they would love to use something like that, and they're helping me build my MVP.

Without reaching out to my customer first, my MVP wouldn't have solved their needs as effectively -- and there would have been too many holes in critical use cases.

After watching all the Steve Blank videos on Youtube, I'm a believer in "get out of the building and talk to customers".

I began like this, with some market research amongst potential users that I know directly. Worked closely with a few. But my problem was that I let myself lose track of this and, when I came back to them with my MVP, it had deviated (by virtue of me generalising it too much) from what they actually wanted to use. So you're spot-on, and sticking with a few customers whilst building the MVP is probably a hugely important step.

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