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.

Outline

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. 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. 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 from non-committal answers?

Get more mileage out of your customer interviews

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 , 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.

“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.

“An MVT is a test of an essential hypothesis — something you must be right about, or else the company won’t stand a chance,” he says.

First, define the “atomic unit” of your idea. Then test it. “For Google, the atomic unit is a search query. For Amazon, it’s ordering a book online. For Coinbase, it’s an easier way to buy and sell crypto,” says Biyani.

He lays out these four steps to test the atomic unit, along with examples of how he used this framework for Maven:

Pick a clear and specific atomic unit. The more niche the better in this case. You are looking for the smallest possible item that you could distill your product down to.
Define your risky assumption and test just one at a time. You will almost always get 2-3 risky assumptions tested in one go, but there should always be a primary.
Devise a test for that specific assumption. If your riskiest hypothesis is execution risk: test out execution by actually trying to deliver the goods or services.
When devising a test, don't build out everything. Focus only on the hypothesis.

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

Like Biyani, Material Security’s Ryan Noon and Abhishek Agrawal took the test-the-idea-without-a-product approach.

When they teamed up to start a company together without a problem in mind, they took a running list of startup ideas and narrowed it down to four.

But to choose the winner, they took “lean” to another level — and decided to head straight to selling.

To do that, they devised a sales test they called “marketing vignettes.”

These vignettes were highly effective for two reasons:

They gauged interest without overwhelming.
They allowed the founders to experiment with messaging.

Go undercover at your day job

If your coworkers fall into your ICP, the validation phase is a great time to conduct some research at the office — before you’ve officially donned the founder hat.

Don’t pitch your friends

Ryan Glasgow did almost the exact opposite from the Linear co-founders. He thinks the best way to validate an idea is to completely remove social pressure from the equation.

When he was validating the idea for the surveying and product research tool, 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.” Glasgow notes that this is particularly important for B2B endeavors.

Consult experts who can add scaffolding to your idea

Potential customers aren’t the only input to consider when evaluating whether or not to proceed to the build. Here’s how these founders tested their ideas with industry experts, investors and fellow founders.

Use industry insiders as a sounding board

Immad Akhund had been sitting on the idea for Mercury for several years while working on his previous startup and later during his stint as a YC partner.

Talk to skeptics

WorkOS founder and CEO Michael Grinich went hunting for a startup idea nobody wanted to solve.

See if other founders have FOMO

After selling his first two companies, Bob Moore knew he wanted to take a bigger swing for his third venture. So he pulled out the running list of ideas he’d scribbled down over the past decade of entrepreneurship and circled the strongest 10. Then, he put them in front of other founders.

Probing fellow founders allowed him to gain insights into which ideas held more potential.