How do I validate a startup idea before building it?

Will says so many people waste time on "pretty UI and convenient interfaces and stuff" when really it's "the minimum stuff that you need to get a paying customer on." The most successful pattern for Phonely was simple: "listen to your customers and build the features that they ask." Every time they thought "this is gonna be a great feature," it didn't get used — but the features one customer asked for, "then like 10 or 15 would use."

During product development Paire "did ask around, talk to people and we did send some prototypes to friends" as a first round of survey. The result "was overwhelmingly good that we didn't really trust it, because friends would always say good things and family would always say oh this is awesome we love it." Nathan's lesson is that real validation "has to come from strangers" — so they ran several surveys a few months after launching, covering website experience, product experience, and future product suggestions. About "three to six months into starting pair, selling to strangers and doing those surveys, that's when we had the real confidence to start scaling this." His advice for founders: "it's very very important to be brutally honest."

Stephen chose a deliberately niche, "nerdy" starting point: PhD-level research for high schoolers. The reason was founder-market fit — "I really get that hustling high school kid, I was that kid," and "I was also that PhD student, so it felt like a good fit of both." It was also easy because, as he puts it, "I had no skills, right, I was like a PhD student." On standing out, he argues education is not actually that competitive, but there are two mistakes: "one is you become too much the educator, you don't think about building the business," and the second is becoming "the private equity dude" who treats students as cash signs — which fails because "education is all about trust" and families can feel when "someone's just trying to get a buck from you."

He went out to an Asian grocery, spent $60 on different spices and chillies — and still has that receipt today — then worked on the recipe night after night for crispiness, spiciness, flavour and aroma until he got it to a level where he thought it was pretty good. That's when he started to bottle it up and sell the first jars. He wasn't thinking about how to compete against other brands; he was just passionate about making the best chili oil and getting it out there.

It was a few years after leaving Young Henry's, a craft beer company, when Pete Brennan called Andy keen to do something in non alcoholic beer, even though he hadn't worked in that area before. As soon as he said it, Andy thought it was a great idea and something he could see a lot of personal relevance in.

Andy had never had what he thought was a problem with alcohol, but he realised there was an opportunity for people who "didn't necessarily identify with being sober" to have a product like this to be able to cut back, or take a night off. They were really building a product for themselves, hoping there were other people out there who were like them, looking for a great tasting, thoughtfully produced beer that wasn't preaching sobriety.

The advice Andy would give, and that he learned through his own experience, is to start before you're ready — start before you feel like you're ready. Most of the time you've got what you need a long time before you feel 100% ready. It can be difficult to know the right time to pull the trigger on diving in, but he believes the earlier the better, and that just starting opens up so many possibilities you may not have even considered in the planning phases.

He credits Startmate as a huge eye opener that stretched their ambitions and built great practices into the way they work. One thing they talk about is the asynchronous bet of just starting something: even if you fail to do what you set out to do, "you will have uncovered all of these other potential pathways along the way" that you may not have been able to imagine before starting.

Satya describes the earliest demo as a scrappy prototype that showed how AI could automate a lot of the manual work analysts were doing. "It wasn't fancy, but it worked." Alongside it they designed a small prototype of what the full platform would look like, which was easier because his co-founder had been in the space. His core line: "in my opinion an MVP isn't about perfection, it's about credibility and conviction — you just need enough for people to believe you can actually deliver what you're promising." He quotes Peter Thiel — "brilliant thinking is rare, but courage is even in shorter supply" — to make the point that you have to be courageous enough to show customers the not-so-fancy product, because the sooner you test it the faster you can iterate and cut through assumptions.

Jason's surprising lesson moving from research to business is that "it's very important to have a good taste for what are the right problems that you should have your robots solve." There are many robotics companies in the past that picked a problem that's too hard or too costly, so it was very hard to penetrate the market and succeed as a business — and the hardware is also innately expensive, which is part of why venture capitals don't really like funding hardware companies. He draws a parallel to research taste — how you pick a good research problem to work on. He also explains why Dyna stays general: in the past a lot of robotics companies went really deep in a vertical, so their software-hardware stack became very specialized in that domain and they couldn't go from one domain to another. That's the kind of thing Dyna doesn't want to do. On choosing napkins and laundry first: it's a scenario where you can't really break the object you're teaching the robot with — napkins are soft — and once you fold cloth nicely you can disturb it so it crumples again and the robot can practice again. From the business side, there's also huge demand: restaurants like the Cheesecake Factory and Applebee's of the world have so many napkins that need folding in the back office that it's almost a full-time employee's job.

The interviews were a mix of over the phone, coffee chats and online. They gave Sam the depth of research he needed to understand, across the full scope of the market, how people were thinking about the problem, how they were solving it for themselves, and how they wanted it solved. One of the biggest takeaways was how differently men and women think about and solve disconnection. From there he put together a rough MVP that was just a prototype.

The pivot was triggered by a conversation. Phung told a friend about the idea of distributing alcohol into Australia, but they knew "there were a lot of restrictions into doing that in terms of you know, cost and um contracts and whatnot and also the time that is needed." The friend's suggestion — "why don't you just do that?" — reframed the whole thing, and Phung's reaction was "Why did I not think of that in the first place?" She "hopped on it" and pitched it to the boys. They also validated the flavour choice against the market: there were "a lot of lemon flavors" and "very safe flavors" in the RTD seltzer space, so they went with lychee as something "exotic but it is approach[able]."

John's college mistake was sending out surveys and creating waitlists to manufacture demand. His realization was that "they are not necessarily doing it because they want to buy the product. They might just be doing it because they're your friend." He contrasts asking someone how much they'd pay versus "them paying me $200 per seat" — "that is like a night and day juxtaposition," where the former "doesn't give you actually any actual information" but the latter turns into "wow I have a customer paying me $600 for three people, how many of these customers are out there." If you're spending time business-modeling instead, "I think you're focusing on the wrong problem."

Hung warns that "everyone will tell you to your face that they love what you're building," but the real test is different. "It's the moment when someone pulls out their credit card that is the turning point" of whether this actually has a fit in the market — "because trolling it is cheap, but to actually pay for it is a whole other thing." His most valuable lesson reinforces it: "don't be ashamed of the product that you're building, just show them even if it's like really bad right now, but at least you all know if that's something that they would want and use."

Floriye realised that scalp and hair should be treated the same, so she brought skincare ingredients and ideas into hair care, drawing on her experience in both the hair industry and the skin beauty space. Competitors weren't doing that at the time, and in her view the market still isn't where it needs to be on skin and hair. The validation was a mix of lived experience, family feedback and walking the aisles to confirm the gap was real.

Ben didn't run abstract validation; he leaned on a community he was already part of. As a long-time boulderer, he knew his friends who climbed indoors wanted a small pot to carry brushes and essentials, sitting between tiny chalk pouches and big bouldering buckets. Designing that midpoint let him test materials and design for people he understood. He picked a first product for "a community that I thought would be really receptive," which de-risked whether anyone wanted it.

Elan was having "a whole host of gut health issues" — "bloating after eating or inflammation or brain fog the next day." The moment she took it seriously was "when I got a hormone panel done and learned that all of my hormones were at an all time low." She learned the best way to heal her gut was probiotics, and "ideally, you get probiotics from foods that you eat, as opposed to taking a pill or a supplement," because food is more bioavailable. As a Stanford Division one rowing athlete who ate Greek yogurt after practice, she figured she was already eating it — but discovered most of it wasn't probiotic, so she started fermenting her own. The founders frame it as advice they kept hearing: starting a business is "really, really hard," so "make sure it's coming from a place where you're really fueled by like, a passion and a broader purpose."

Nate's original idea was a marketplace to challenge Depop, eBay and Etsy, built on the insight that Australia has huge textile waste and people hoard clothing. But the customer conversations reframed the problem: "after speaking to, like, hundreds of buyers and sellers, it became very apparent that, buying wasn't the problem. I think there's a lot of choices to buy. It's selling. That was the problem." They shifted focus and "doubled down on the seller proposition," then realised similar global products existed but none they'd heard of, so they "decided to try and build the best one globally" — and that's how they birthed Shopfront.

Selina knew nutrition can be "a pretty sensitive topic" and that sharing could bring negativity, so before committing she did "a lot of market research on whether this was something people wanted." The 400-person survey didn't just give a yes/no — it showed the shape of demand: some people wanted just one accountability friend, others wanted a wider friend group. That nuance fed directly into how the team designed sharing controls, letting users make their circle as tight as a single friend or even zero.

The largest creators have agents and wouldn't come on, so it only targeted small creators; and clients are already tied to their agencies, so they wouldn't pick up a malfunctioning platform with bad UI/UX. At the end of the day it only captured the smallest startups and smallest creators, with no real connection to be made. She realised the real product was herself, her team and the network — not a separate piece of software. Her conclusion: you can't out market a bad product, so build something people want.