Just Start: Thoughts on Ideas and Validation
Your goal is to learn as quickly as you can, and the best way to do that it to put a product in the hands of your potential customers.
Whenever I speak with a friend or new connection about their startup idea or plans for a company, my advice always boils down to one simple thing: just start.
It doesn’t matter if the idea is half-baked, in a crowded space, missing a compelling hook, or just plain awful. Once you start building, you start learning and begin an endless process of iterating and improvement. Some companies iterate to success, others pivot to new spaces, and some burn to the ground and start fresh with better ideas. You can’t predict the route but you can start.
Happyfeed’s journey is unique because the app has been around for nearly 10 years now. Every year I learn something that I wish I’d learned long ago, and it’s a constant process of iterating and growing. My only real regrets are things that I didn’t learn or try earlier on — being better at embracing the build / test / iterate mentality.
Encourage, Encourage, Encourage
It’s fun to be clever. When we hear someone pitch an idea to us, it’s in our nature to want to point out some novel perspective — often a reason it won’t work or an angle they surely hadn’t considered. Well… there are endless reasons any idea won’t work and infinite angles founders haven’t considered. Though it may feel constructive to highlight risks and pitfalls, this typically mostly leads to demotivation. Founders are already in a precarious mental state: weighing the decision to take a risk with their time and money.
Don’t Say…
“I’m not your target customer but…” (followed by literally anything)
“Is this defensible? How are you going to respond if <company> attempts to enter your space?”
Do Say…
“That’s a neat idea. What do you think is the smallest version that would bring value to your customers?”
“This reminds me of X product solving Y problem. You should check out how they started in the early days!”
Don’t put the founder into a negative spiral. Encourage them to take steps toward launching as soon as possible. You can be productive and helpful without being a downer. The reality of real customers trying their product is always better than any quick critique over coffee.
Let’s dive into why you should absolutely launch as soon as possible.
Iterate Toward Greatness
Henry Ford allegedly (and famously) claimed, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses,” in regard to the automobile. The concept is that people don’t always know the best solution to really address their needs.
If you spend too much time talking to users, planning, and thinking about your solution, you can easily get caught in the “faster horse” trap. Trying lots of quick experiments is a better way to reach actual innovation. The best solutions aren’t always something people can predict, especially if you want to be disruptive rather than incremental.
Early prototypes, launches, and updates change the whole dynamic of communicating your idea to others and open up new ways to gather insights.
Learning from your customers
I first launched Happyfeed Pods as a way to share your journaling habit with friends. Not your entries, but how many days in a row you completed and which days of the current week: simple accountability. But one of the first bits of feedback I received was,
“How can I see memories from members of my Pod?”
I would’ve been afraid to launch a full sharing feature in Happyfeed from the start. Would it alienate users? No one was asking for it, but it turns out that many journalers wanted a way to privately share once they same a glimmer of the idea. Now sharing is a core part of what makes the product unique.
Learning from other founders
The same goes for talking to fellow founders, mentors, and investors. Until you have something to show them and test out, ideas are difficult to dig into… more nebulous.
Like in a well-run brainstorm, I’m a strong believer that any idea (good or bad) is the best place to start. Half-baked thoughts give others a starting position. Once others can understand your starting point, they’ll be more anxious to think of improvements.
“What if it did this instead?”
“Wouldn’t it be cool to try using it for this other scenario?”
You get the idea.
Discover New Problems
The term “pivot” has been overused and practically beaten to death by tech industry over the past decade. But it’s a very real and helpful way to frame how a business can evolve. While working on an problems, it’s common to notice other related problems. And the same is true for solutions: maybe your first try fails but you can happen upon a better solution for that same problem.
Instagram’s Pivot to Photos
Instagram famously started out as a check-in app called Brbn. The founders realized that photos were the most popular part of the app and eventually pivoted to the concept that we all know and love. This focusing helped them turn in a confusing product into something easy to understand, use, and share with others.
This is a perfect example of pivoting the solution.
Using B2C Insights to Build B2B
The founders of RevenueCat started out by building subscription apps for iOS. They realized that subscriptions were a growing business and that they had strong, unique knowledge on how to improve the experience. Now their product is loved by developers in the app industry.
I’m all about B2C companies, but if your B2C product leads you to an insight that can become an awesome B2B concept, go for it!
You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know
This might be the top reason why I think it’s best to get started on something versus waiting for the perfect idea.
There are aspects of building a consumer startup that you won’t be remotely aware of until you reach that step of the journey. Even if you start with the “wrong” product, you can bring learnings to that thing that actually ends up working. These can be nuances in the ecosystem, efficient ways to build product, or pitfalls to avoid.
Some examples from my experience so far:
Importance of ASO. For iOS and Android apps, visibility in the app stores is crucial and (as it turns out) solved problem. There are best-practices that can save months of frustration and quickly grow downloads. (I would say the same is true for SEO.)
Pretty much everything business-related. From figuring out Section 83b to filing taxes and generating a Terms of Service, I can guarantee your second business will be faster than your first.
Communication. Talking to press, replying to customer feedback, and improving the copy on your website all get easier with practice. These skills (and many, many more) apply to most businesses so you might as well learn now.
Risk Reduction is a Waste of Time
We have a tendency to want to reduce risk early on. Why dive in head first without testing the depths or double-checking that your life jacket functions?
This is a HUGE distraction and a MASSIVE waste of time.
This includes:
Wasting your time building up your following on a social platform. This can work in B2B, but your founder friends are likely NOT going to be your target customer. I’m not saying that Twitter followers will hurt your company, but you shouldn’t focus on this in lieu of launching a testable product. If writing a Substack post provides you with an outlet that isn’t obsessing over your startup idea though… go for it!
Talking to everyone and their mother about your idea. Even if you follow the best practices for distilling insights from customer interviews, you’re going to have strong biases. Everyone will tell you how great the idea is because they don’t want to be a downer. Most people can’t tell the difference, don’t assume you’re the exception.
Researching the best tools, or over-engineering. Early on it’s fun to plan out your perfectly scalable app using the best tools and novel research. But it turns out that most of the problems are already solved and you just need to put the pieces together in a smart way. Don’t waste time reinventing the wheel for marginal improvements to the end user.
If you’re attached to the idea of launching the perfect product or de-risking every aspect of your idea, you’re going to have a rough time. Getting an early product into the hands of users is the best form of derisking — how else would you ever really know if you’re building something they want?
Where to Start If You Haven’t Started Yet?
Anywhere and on anything. Even the most mundane to-do list app will get you going.
Use your early product as an entry ticket into a community of other builders and a launch pad to try other (hopefully somewhat crazy) ideas.
Many people would suggest that you start on the cutting edge: learn to build for Apple’s new Vision Pro or try a new kind of generative AI. I think it’s best just to start wherever is easiest for you and remember to iterate along the way and try not to get too tied to one idea, though you absolutely will.