Let’s face it. Startup ideas are a dime a dozen. Everyone these days seems to have the next great idea which will bring them fame and fortune. Spoiler alert, they won’t. Yet for those intrepid souls who persevere through the ideation phase of their startup, how does one get to the minimum viable product? How can you tell if your startup idea is validated?
We are teaming up with Kernal to address this very topic. Kernal allows you to take your startup idea from a napkin idea to an exit. It is a private community where you can not only build in public, but find users, investors, co-founders, and more. You can apply for access here.
Here we go.
Startup ideas come from so many different sources that we wrote an entire article on it. But having a good idea is just the beginning. You will need to make sure that the idea itself can be validated and that you can actually build a minimum viable product around it.
In order for this to happen, you will need market validation.
According to Harvard Business School, market validation is the process of determining if there’s a need for your product in your target market. Why is this important? Because even the best ideas are meaningless unless you can have customers at scale pay a price for your offering.
Without proper market validation, especially at the early stages, founders could waste their limited resources on pursuing a startup that leads nowhere.
The data supports this. Failory interviewed well over 100 startup founders who had failed. Their findings show that 34% of startups failed due to the lack of product-market fit.