When you have a startup idea, you need to ask a simple question: does anyone actually want it?
Market validation is the process of checking if there’s real demand for your product or service before you invest time, money and resources building it.
It’s about proving that your idea solves a real problem for real people.
🚀 Most startups fail not because of bad code or branding — but because no one needs the product: the need the product fulfills is not felt by customers.
Validation helps you:
✅ Avoid wasting resources
✅ Understand your customers
✅ Build something people will actually use
✅ Attracting funding and convincing investors
🔍 You don’t need a full product to validate your idea. Start with:
1. Problem Interviews – Talk to potential users. Ask about their pains, not your solution.
2. Landing Page Test – Build a simple page explaining your idea. Measure sign-ups or clicks.
3. Pre-orders or Waitlists – See if people are willing to commit early, without the product being available.
4. MVPs (Minimum Viable Products) – Build a barebones (or simulated) version of the product and see if anyone is interested in it.
💡 When Dropbox started, they didn’t build the whole product first.
They made a simple demo video explaining the concept to potential customers and showing how it worked in general: thousands signed up.
This was an example of market validation: they proved there was a pool of interested customers before writing a single line of complex code, convincing investors their idea could attract paying users without actually having to build anything.
There are many books and resources that can teach you about market validation and its importance, some of our favourite takeaways when thinking of effective market validation are:
💬 Don’t fall in love with your solution. Fall in love with the problem.
📢 Start talking to people early, it will give you valuable feedback and insights.
📉 No interest? That’s useful data too and it doesn’t mean your venture is dead: pivot or rethink it.
✅ Validation isn’t a one-time thing — keep testing as you grow and never abandon market validation if you want long-lasting success and user satisfaction.
And remember: great startups are built on real needs.
