# Is Your Startup Idea Any Good? Borrow These Validation Tactics from the Founders of Linear, Mercury and More

Founders share the unconventional ways they found conviction in their startup ideas.

When repeat founder **Bob Moore** was mulling over ideas for his third startup, he didn’t simply talk to potential customers to suss out demand for a few of his favorite ideas. He turned to fellow founders.

“With founders, I wasn’t asking, ‘Would you buy this?’ But instead, ‘Would you start this company? And what are the things that you think you might bump into?’” he says. Turns out most of the founders he spoke to chose the same idea. It was through this “founder discovery” that he singled out the one that would eventually become his current company, **Crossbeam.**

Moore’s unconventional method of validation got us thinking about how founders find conviction for their startup ideas — and how deeply personal that process can be. And while AI tools have certainly lowered the technical hurdles and shortened the timeline to build and validate prototypes, the stakes of problem selection remain high as ever. This is something you could spend upward of 10 years of your life working on. No pressure.

There’s no shortage of prescriptive advice floating around on how you should approach this process: Talk to [X amount of customers](https://review.firstround.com/how-to-know-if-your-ideas-the-right-one-a-founders-guide-for-successful-early-stage-customer-discovery/), listen for a repeated pain point, get to work building a solution that addresses it. But the process is rarely ever that straightforward. *Who* should you talk to? Which questions should you ask? How can you parse out [glimmers of potential](https://review.firstround.com/non-obvious-signs-of-early-startup-traction-and-how-to-spot-them/) from non-committal answers?

So we’ve revisited our interviews with founders from companies like **Linear** and **Mercury** to surface the strategies they used to find conviction in their ideas long before writing a single line of code. Some did talk to potential customers, but used unconventional tactics to get a deeper read on the market. Others, like Moore, turned to entirely different audiences — like industry experts and fellow founders — to get meaningful feedback to shape their ideas.

If the sheer variety of methods we’ve included here is any indication, there’s no singular scientific way to validate your startup idea. Take your pick of what fits with your problem and market — or maybe even try a mix to get an even stronger signal.

## Get more mileage out of your customer interviews

[Customer discovery](https://review.firstround.com/how-to-know-if-your-ideas-the-right-one-a-founders-guide-for-successful-early-stage-customer-discovery/) is a well-trodden — and some would say essential — path for startup idea validation. But the mere act of talking to anyone you might sell to doesn’t guarantee you’ll walk away learning something. Here’s how you can find the right folks to chat with, design intentional interviews and make sure no one’s blowing smoke.

### Run minimum viable tests

[**Gagan Biyani**](https://www.linkedin.com/in/gaganbiyani?ref=review.firstround.com)**,** repeat founder and now CEO of **Maven**, has developed an alternative to the MVP designed for the sole purpose of validating an idea before you build. It’s called the [Minimum Viable Test](https://review.firstround.com/the-minimum-viable-testing-process-for-evaluating-startup-ideas/).

“I’ve been early at four startups: Udemy, Lyft, Sprig and Maven. Three of them achieved over $1M in run-rate in their first six months of going live. I don’t think this is an accident. I generally think this early success could’ve been predicted before a single line of code was written,” says Biyani.

He attributes this track record to his now-codified MVT method.

**Four Steps to Test the Atomic Unit:** 
1. **Pick a clear and specific atomic unit.** The more niche the better. This unit is important because consumers rarely ever buy the value proposition of a company; they buy a specific item that you are selling. “For Maven, the atomic unit is a cohort-based course. How can we test whether cohort-based courses work as quickly as possible?” he says.
2. **Define your risky assumption and test just one at a time.** There should always be a primary risky assumption; otherwise, you won’t get conclusive results. For Maven, the riskiest assumption was whether folks would be willing to pay 10x more for a cohort-based course than for an asynchronous course.
3. **Devise a test for that specific assumption.** If your riskiest hypothesis is execution risk, test execution by trying to deliver the goods or services in a hack-y way. “For Maven, the primary risk is a profit question: Will consumers be satisfied with buying a cohort-based course for a significantly higher price point than video-based courses?”  
4. **When devising a test, don't build out everything.** Focus only on the hypothesis. Biyani ran just one course to test the risky assumptions for Maven. “It was a hyper-narrow test that achieved the exact result I was looking for: The course had a 9/10 rating from its students and made over $150,000 in revenue in its first cohort.”

### Test your sales chops with a product that doesn’t exist

**Ryan Noon** and **Abhishek Agrawal** took the [test-the-idea-without-a-product approach](https://review.firstround.com/material-securitys-path-to-product-market-fit/). They took a running list of startup ideas and narrowed it down before heading straight to selling.

To do that, they devised a sales test they called “marketing vignettes.” No demo, no landing page, just pitch decks built to look like pared-down sales landing pages, with descriptions of different features.

These vignettes were highly effective for two reasons:
- **They gauged interest without overwhelming.** “There was just enough UI to convey a concept without letting you get bogged down with it with a customer,” Agrawal says.
- **They allowed the founders to experiment with messaging.** “When you make marketing vignettes, you have to name your features and also convey in a couple of sentences what the benefits are.”

### Go undercover at your day job

If your coworkers fall into your [ICP](https://review.firstround.com/how-vanta-clay-retool-found-icp/), this is a great time to conduct some research at the office. This is especially useful if you’re thinking about an idea born out of personal experience, which is often the case for developer and infrastructure tools.

**Karri Saarinen** did this when ruminating on the idea for **Linear.** He and his co-founders hated the project management software they used for their jobs, so they ran informal user research with their coworkers. They asked about their companies’ software dev project management tool of choice:
- What do you think is bad about this tool?
- How would you want to improve it?
- What would make you more productive?

### Don’t pitch your friends

**Ryan Glasgow** believes that the best way to validate an idea is to completely remove social pressure. He built some lightweight mockups and pitched them to strangers.

“**One of the key learnings I had early is to never involve people who you personally know in the customer development process**.”

### Consult experts who can add scaffolding to your idea

Potential customers aren’t the only input to consider. Here’s how these founders tested their ideas with industry experts:

- **Use industry insiders as a sounding board:** **Immad Akhund** sought out fintech founders to test the feasibility of his idea for **Mercury.**
- **Talk to skeptics:** **Michael Grinich** went hunting for ideas that nobody wanted to solve.

### See if other founders have FOMO

After selling his first two companies, **Bob Moore** put his list of ideas in front of other founders. “Founders are special. They need to develop an extremely high level of empathy and understanding for the needs of people across multiple personas.”

He made sure to set up a guard to fend off bias. “I’d say, ‘Hey, I've got three business ideas. I like them all equally. I want to pitch you on them and see where it goes.’ The idea for what would become **Crossbeam** quickly bubbled to the top.