Validating a business idea is the step that almost everyone skips. I know because I skipped it myself on my first product and spent four months building something that precisely nobody wanted to pay for. That experience cost me time, money and a decent chunk of pride, but it taught me the single most important lesson in entrepreneurship: falling in love with your idea is the most expensive mistake you can make.
Since then I have launched CampSuite, Crocodile and RealCube. Every one of them started with validation before a single line of code was written. Not because I am naturally patient, but because I learned the hard way what happens when you skip it.
This post is the validation process I actually use. No academic frameworks, no canvases with thirty boxes to fill in. Just the practical steps that tell you whether your idea has legs before you commit months of your life to building it.
Start with the problem, not the product
The first question is not "what should I build?" It is "who has a problem that is painful enough to pay someone to solve it?" Those are completely different questions and they lead to completely different places.
When I started CampSuite, I did not begin with the idea of building campsite management software. I began with a conversation with a campsite owner who was running his entire operation from a spreadsheet and a paper diary. He was losing bookings. He was double booking pitches. He was spending his evenings doing admin instead of running his business. That is a painful problem. That is the kind of problem people pay to make go away.
If you cannot describe the problem you are solving in one sentence, and if that sentence does not make the person hearing it wince slightly because they recognise the pain, you probably do not have a strong enough problem yet.
Talk to people who have the problem
This is where most technical founders go wrong. We would rather write code than talk to strangers. I get it. But there is no substitute for actually speaking to the people you think will buy your product.
You need at least ten conversations with potential customers before you have any right to start building. Not surveys. Not polls on social media. Actual conversations where you shut up and listen to how they describe their problem in their own words.
What to ask
Do not pitch your idea. Do not describe your solution. Ask them about their problem. How do they deal with it today? What have they tried? How much time or money does it cost them? What would a solution need to do for them to switch from whatever they are currently using?
The answers will surprise you. When I was validating what became Crocodile, I assumed small businesses wanted cheaper HR software. What they actually told me was that they did not care about cheap. They wanted something that did not require a three month implementation and a dedicated HR person to run it. The price was secondary. The complexity was the real problem.
That insight completely changed what I built. If I had just assumed I knew the problem and started coding, I would have built the wrong thing.
Where to find people to talk to
LinkedIn is genuinely useful for this. Find people who match your target customer profile and send them a message. Be honest. Tell them you are researching a problem and would value fifteen minutes of their time. Most people are surprisingly willing to help if you are not trying to sell them something.
Industry forums, trade shows, Facebook groups, Reddit communities. Anywhere your potential customers already hang out. Go where they are, do not expect them to come to you.
Look for willingness to pay, not just interest
This is the bit that separates a viable business idea from a nice idea that everyone says they love but nobody actually buys. Interest and willingness to pay are completely different things.
When someone says "oh that sounds great, I would definitely use that" it means almost nothing. People are polite. They want to be encouraging. They will tell you your idea is brilliant even if they would never spend a penny on it.
The real test is whether someone will put money down. Not hypothetical money. Actual money. Or at the very least, whether they will commit time and effort to being an early customer. If you cannot get a single person to pre order, put down a deposit, or sign a letter of intent, that is a very loud signal that the market is not there.
With CampSuite, I had three campsite owners agree to pay for the software before I had written a line of code. They paid for a product that did not exist yet because the problem was painful enough and my description of the solution was specific enough that they trusted it would help. That is validation. Everything else is wishful thinking.
Build the smallest possible version
Once you have validated the problem and confirmed willingness to pay, build the absolute minimum that solves the core problem. Not a prototype. Not a demo. A real, working product that does one thing well enough for someone to use it in their actual business.
I have written about this concept extensively in The 28 Day Startup. The idea is not to build something rough or embarrassing. It is to ruthlessly strip away everything that is not essential to solving the primary problem you validated in your conversations.
For CampSuite, the first version did bookings and a pitch map. That was it. No payment processing, no automated emails, no reporting dashboard. Just bookings and a pitch map, because those were the two things that caused the most pain. Everything else came later, informed by what real paying customers actually asked for.
The validation traps to avoid
Over twenty five years of building products, I have watched founders fall into the same validation traps repeatedly. Here are the ones that catch the most people.
Asking friends and family
Your mum thinks your idea is brilliant. Your mates will tell you to go for it. These people love you and want you to succeed. They are the worst possible source of honest feedback about whether a business idea is viable. Talk to strangers who have the problem. They have no reason to spare your feelings.
Treating a landing page as validation
Putting up a landing page and getting email signups tells you that people are curious. It does not tell you they will pay. I have seen founders collect a thousand email addresses and then launch to tumbleweed because curiosity and purchase intent are worlds apart. A landing page is a marketing tool, not a validation method.
Over researching and never starting
There is a point where validation becomes procrastination. If you have spoken to twenty people, confirmed the problem is real, and got at least a handful to commit to paying, you have enough. Ship something. The market will teach you the rest faster than any amount of additional research.
Validating the solution instead of the problem
Showing someone a mockup and asking "would you use this?" is validating your solution. It skips the most important part, which is confirming that the problem is real and painful enough to create a market. Solutions can be redesigned. If the problem is not real, no amount of clever UX will save you.
What good validation looks like
After going through this process, you should be able to answer four questions clearly.
First, who specifically has this problem? Not "small businesses" or "people who travel." A specific type of person with a specific role dealing with a specific pain. For CampSuite it was independent campsite owners with ten to two hundred pitches who were managing bookings manually.
Second, how do they solve the problem today? If the answer is "they do not," that is either a massive opportunity or a sign the problem is not actually painful enough to bother solving. Usually the latter.
Third, will they pay, and roughly how much? You need evidence, not assumptions. Pre orders, deposits, letters of intent, or at bare minimum a conversation where someone named a price they would pay without you prompting them.
Fourth, can you reach these people? A brilliant product for a customer you cannot find or afford to reach is a hobby, not a business. You need a realistic path to getting your product in front of the right people at a cost that makes sense. I talk about this more in my post on the SaaS metrics that actually matter when bootstrapped.
Validation is not a phase, it is a habit
The biggest mistake people make is treating validation as a box to tick before they start building. It is not. It is an ongoing conversation with your market that never stops.
Every feature you add should be validated. Every pricing change should be tested. Every assumption about what your customers want should be checked against what they actually do. The businesses I have seen fail are the ones where the founder stopped listening to the market after launch and started listening to their own internal narrative instead.
Building a business is hard enough without adding the extra difficulty of solving a problem nobody has. Do the work upfront. Talk to people. Confirm the pain is real. Get someone to commit money. Then build the smallest thing that solves the biggest pain. It is not glamorous, but it is the difference between a business that works and an expensive lesson.
If you want the full framework for going from idea to launch in twenty eight days, including the validation steps in much more detail, register your interest in The 28 Day Startup. It is everything I have learned about building products quickly and sensibly, without the waffle.
