Real accounts of validation, including the ones where the answer was no.
Reply with:
- The idea
- What you did to test it: conversations, a landing page, pre-sales, a manual version, a prototype
- How long and how much it cost
- What you found
- What you decided
- Looking back, was the test a good one?
Tests people commonly run, from weakest evidence to strongest:
- Asking friends
- A survey
- A waiting list
- Conversations about the problem with strangers who have it
- A deposit or pre-order
- Doing the job by hand for a paying customer
- A working first version with paying users
Each step up costs more and proves more. The mistake to avoid is stopping at the cheap end and treating it as proof: a waiting list of 500 people who were never asked to pay has shown interest in a sentence and nothing about the product.
Also welcome: ideas you dropped after testing. Say what the test showed.