I was recently speaking with an entrepreneur who had a very interesting idea. He was pitching on raising money to go build a product to sell to certain customers. When I asked if he had spoken to any of those customers he was going to sell to, he said no.

Internal research is helpful but not enough

Researching online can be helpful to get you smarter on your market. Reading industry articles, understanding the competitive landscape, seeing what comes up when you google key words, and reading chat boards for user comments can all be helpful tools. But that alone is not sufficient to validate an idea to go launch a business.

Testing real feedback with prospects

I tell people all the time whether they or I think it is a good idea doesn’t matter. What matters is what potential customers think. But not just what they think, what they do. How have they already tried to solve the problem before? Why was that not good enough? Will they sign up to be design partners and build a first version with you? Will they pay for your service even when it is early and not perfect?

Feedback from paying customers

Everyone has opinions - but when a customer uses a free version they often don’t share their real feedback because they are getting it for free and don’t want to offend you. Or worse, they don’t really use the product since they had other priorities and it didn’t cost them anything. But when customers are paying something >0, I find they much more frequently use the product and emphatically share their thoughts. That is valuable feedback you do not want to miss.

Every great idea requires several pivots. Those pivots don’t happen until you are out speaking with and serving customers. The sooner you can make those pivots, the faster you get to a better answer as well as less money you will waste building products that customers don’t want. While you are still figuring this out, consider alternative forms of funding until you start validating some authentic demand.