Your startup idea means sh*t
Instead of focusing on your idea validation, it's much better to decide which customers you will serve first and then build a product for those customers.
You might be tempted to validate your idea as a first step to building your startup. This is actually an excellent thirst step. The first thing you need to do is create an ideal customer profile.
The first time I came across the Value Proposition Canvas, I thought it was a great starting point to explore and validate our idea. We thought of building a tool for investors' updates. Yet, once we started to analyze the customer needs using the value proposition canvas, it had hit me that the canvas takes a somewhat naïve approach to who the customer would be. In a sense, it forces you to shoot an arrow and then draw the target around it. In our case, we have no passion for a specific tool, but rather, only passion around a particular type of customer: the startup CEO and preferably the first-time startup CEO.
Steve Blank is one of the most outstanding entrepreneurship educators. He developed several frameworks, including the customer discovery and customer development methods that became the base for the lean startup model. One of Blank's first lessons is: "get out of the building." In this lesson, Blank explains that successful startups are developed by iterating together with customers around solving a problem. I think this is a crucial lesson. In reality, we got it wrong.
