Validating Your Business Idea: Strategies From Experienced Entrepreneurs

The most effective validation strategy we used at Dynaris was direct customer conversations before we wrote a single line of production code. We identified our target niche—small service businesses like salons, cleaning companies, and wellness clinics—and cold-called roughly 80 owners in a two-week sprint. We weren’t selling anything. We were asking: “What happens when you miss a call? How do you handle booking after hours? What would you pay to never miss a customer call again?”

What we learned fundamentally reshaped our go-to-market. We originally assumed owners wanted a chatbot or a web widget. They didn’t—they wanted someone (or something) to answer the phone, because calls were still their #1 way customers booked. That insight locked in our voice-first architecture before we built it.

The impact on decision-making was immediate: we killed three feature ideas we had been excited about and doubled down on the call-handling and booking workflow. It also gave us real pricing anchors from actual buyers, not guesses.

My recommendation for first-time entrepreneurs: don’t mistake market research reports or Twitter opinions for validation. Talk to 50 real humans in your target market before you touch the product. The goal isn’t to confirm your hypothesis—it’s to break it. If it survives those 50 conversations, you have something worth building.

I’m Runbo Li, Co-founder & CEO at Magic Hour.

The best validation strategy isn’t a survey or a landing page. It’s putting the actual work into the world and seeing if strangers care enough to share it. That’s what we did, and it told us everything we needed to know before we wrote a single line of product code.

In early 2023, I was frustrated by how long it took to make video content for my parents’ small businesses. So I started hacking together AI video workflows using Stable Diffusion and posting the results on social media every single day. No company, no brand, no product page. Just output. I made an AI-stylized edit of an NBA highlight, posted it, and it exploded. Over 200 million people saw our content. Mark Cuban followed me, became a paying customer, and the Dallas Mavericks reached out organically. That wasn’t a focus group telling me the idea had potential. That was the market screaming at me.

That experience shaped every decision we made afterward. We didn’t build features based on guesses. We built based on what people were already asking us for. When thousands of people DM you saying “how did you make that,” you don’t need a business plan to know there’s demand. You need to ship the tool.

Here’s what I’d tell first-time founders: stop trying to validate in theory. Build the smallest version of the thing you want to exist and put it in front of real people, not friends, not advisors, not your co-founder. Strangers. The internet makes this almost free. Post on TikTok, Reddit, X, wherever your audience lives. If people engage, share, and ask for more, you have signal. If they don’t, you just saved yourself six months of building something nobody wants.

The other thing validation taught me is speed matters more than polish. Our early videos were rough. The AI artifacts were obvious. Nobody cared. They cared about the idea, the creativity, the “wait, how did you do that” factor. Founders waste months perfecting a pitch deck when they could spend a weekend making something real and learning ten times more from the response.

Don’t ask people if they’d use your product. Make them prove it by showing up.

The strategy that saved me from a costly mistake was selling before building. Not theoretically validating demand through surveys or landing pages but actually trying to collect money for the product before it existed. The responses people give when you ask would you use this are fundamentally different from what happens when you ask can I charge your card for this.

I had an idea for a project management tool tailored to a specific industry. The concept felt strong: I’d experienced the pain firsthand, talked to others who shared it, and could articulate a clear solution. Every informal conversation confirmed the idea was worth pursuing. If I’d stopped there I would have spent months building something based on encouraging but meaningless feedback.

Instead I created a simple one-page description of what the tool would do, priced it at what I thought was fair, and approached fifteen people in my network who matched the target customer profile. I asked each one to pre-purchase an annual subscription with a full refund guarantee if the product didn’t meet their expectations within six months of launch.

Three said yes immediately. Four said the idea was great but they weren’t ready to commit financially. Eight said no with various polite explanations. That ratio told me everything. The enthusiasm I’d been hearing in casual conversations translated to roughly a 20% actual purchase rate enough to suggest real demand but far lower than the near-universal positive feedback had implied.

More valuable than the numbers were the conversations with people who declined. Two told me the price was wrong not too high but structured incorrectly for how their companies budgeted software. One explained that the problem I was solving wasn’t painful enough to justify switching from their current workaround. Another said she’d buy it but only if it integrated with a specific tool I hadn’t considered.

Those conversations reshaped the product before a single line of code was written. I adjusted the pricing structure, reprioritised features, and added an integration that became one of our strongest selling points at launch. The three pre-sales also gave me early customers who were invested in the product’s success and provided ongoing feedback throughout development.

My recommendation is blunt: if you can’t get a stranger to pay you before the product exists, reconsider whether the demand is real. Enthusiasm is cheap. Transactions are honest.

My validation strategy was dead simple: charge for it before you build it.

Before I built Memelord.com — what I call the “Canva for memes” — I launched a paid newsletter called Meme Alerts at $6.90/month. No SaaS, no tech team, no venture capital. Just a newsletter curating the best memes for brands to rip and post.

I priced it at $6.90 on purpose. Weird enough that no one pays it accidentally — that’s a considered purchase. And people paid. Marketing teams at companies like Beehiiv, Morning Brew, Coinbase, and HubSpot signed up because they were already losing the meme war and they knew it.

That paid traction completely changed how I made decisions. I didn’t build a product hoping someone would care — I had receipts. I self-taught no-code, built the memelord.com MVP in three weeks, and eventually raised a $3M pre-seed from Slow Ventures, Long Journey Ventures, Balaji Srinivasan, and others.

The validation also sharpened my pitch. I wasn’t selling a theory — I was selling a product that already had paying customers.

My advice to first-time founders: don’t build first. Sell first. A paid newsletter, a manual concierge, a waitlist with a paywall — anything that puts real dollars on the line before you write a single line of code. Revenue is the only validation that matters.

Score every assumption before you build anything. Before launching, I ran every feature idea and market hypothesis through ICE scoring: Impact, Confidence, and Effort, each rated 0 to 10. The formula is (Impact + Confidence) / Effort. If you can’t score high on confidence, you don’t have evidence. You have enthusiasm.

That one rule killed the “wouldn’t it be cool if…” conversations fast. In health tech, building on excitement instead of evidence has real consequences. A feature that misreads user behavior doesn’t just miss a metric. It breaks the trust someone placed in the product to understand their health, and rebuilding that is slow.

The biggest lesson came from our own assumptions. We expected age and geography to predict user behavior. Our data from over 20,000 users showed that belief structures predicted engagement far more reliably. If we had skipped validation and built on those early assumptions, we would have built the wrong product entirely.

My recommendation is to validate the evidence, not the idea. If you can’t defend the confidence score, you’re not ready to build.

Although I’m a huge proponent of research and data-driven decisions, not all data is an actual data point. Sometimes it’s a sentiment, a reaction, or a solution to a problem you’re having. And the business idea is just hedging a bet that other people have the same problem. It’s qualitative data. And in my experience, it’s the most valuable kind.

There’s a well-known principle in UX research that five qualitative user interviews will tell you more about what’s broken than a million data points from analytics. I didn’t learn that from a textbook. I lived it. I was looking for a job. The quantitative data (applications sent, interviews landed, offers received) said keep going. But the qualitative signal was telling a completely different story. People were reaching out to me directly, unsolicited, asking for my expertise. Five conversations told me more about where the market needed me than hundreds of job applications ever did.

That’s when I stopped optimizing for the wrong metric and started my consultancy. I’m selling over 20 years of experience in product strategy and experience design. And the validation wasn’t a survey or a business plan. It was real people showing up with real problems and asking me to solve them.

So my recommendation to first-time entrepreneurs: stop waiting for the data to give you permission. Pay attention to the qualitative signals. The inbound requests. The conversations that keep happening. The problem people keep bringing to your door. Sometimes the best validation isn’t something you go find. It’s already finding you. You just have to stop looking at the wrong dashboard long enough to notice it.

One effective strategy I used to validate my business idea was starting small with live, in-person property workshops before scaling into a full education platform. By hosting intimate crash courses and engaging directly with aspiring investors, I could see real demand, understand their pain points, and refine my teaching approach in real time. This hands-on validation gave me confidence that people didn’t just want theory, they wanted practical, actionable strategies like low-money-down deals and creative finance.

This early feedback shaped every decision I made, from building structured mentorship programs to creating scalable online education. It ensured I was solving real problems, not assumptions. My advice to first-time entrepreneurs: test your idea in the real world quickly, charge early if possible, and let your audience shape your offering. Validation isn’t about perfection, it’s about proof that people genuinely need what you’re building.

The most effective validation strategy we used was testing willingness to commit before we built anything. After many industry conversations, we asked a small group of operators if they would invest time, share data, and stay involved if we solved the problem they described. This distinction mattered because interest is easy to give, but commitment needs real belief in the problem.

This approach changed how we make decisions in early stages. It helped us filter out polite enthusiasm and focus on real problems businesses face. We only moved forward when people showed they would give time, data, and accountability. We recommend first time entrepreneurs measure behavior early and refine the problem if there is no commitment.

I don’t like overthinking ideas in isolation. For me, validation starts very simply: I bring the idea to the people who would actually be involved in executing it. We have a quick, honest discussion: what works, what doesn’t, what’s unclear, and what it would actually take to make it real.

It’s important that this is not a “nice” conversation, but a practical one with questions about resources, timelines, risks, and expected outcomes. If after that discussion we can outline a clear and realistic set of next steps: who does what, in what order, and why, then the idea is worth moving forward.

If we can’t get to that level of clarity quickly, it usually means the idea is either too raw or not strong enough yet, and we either refine it or drop it.

This approach has helped me avoid spending too much time on ideas that look good on paper but don’t hold up in execution. It also makes decision-making faster, because you’re not relying only on your own perspective, you’re testing the idea in a real operational context from the beginning.

My advice to first-time entrepreneurs is simple: don’t try to perfect the idea alone. Bring in the people who will build it with you, pressure-test it early, and focus on turning it into clear, actionable steps as quickly as possible.

We frequently interact with people from our industry sector (at least once per week before and after launch). These are not surveys; these are interviews—true conversations. Our product roadmap became a direct result of the actual conversations that occurred with hospitality operators—not a product roadmap based upon assumptions.

This direct feedback loop served as a key part of our validation process. For example, through a 20-minute conversation with an operator, we were able to learn details that would never show up in 6 months worth of analytic data (What frustrates a restaurant GM at 11 pm? What do bartenders want from job boards? What are the “real” hiring pain points?).

We absolutely viewed our initial “mistakes” as data — we did not look upon early versions of the product that did not gain traction as failures; we treated them as opportunities to refine our product. If something isn’t resonating, then it’s time to pivot. We had no attachment to the original concept; we were 100% committed to solving real problems.

To those of you that are first-time entrepreneurs, I’d advise to not just seek validation of your ideas, but build those companies that pass this “scrutiny.” And spend time talking to your real users!

The most effective way I validated a business idea before launch was by getting it out of my head and into real conversations as early as possible. Before building too much, I shared the idea with people who looked like potential users, market experts, people in my network, and startup communities. The goal was not to collect polite encouragement. It was to hear where people got confused, what felt unnecessary, and which objections kept repeating.

That process had a real impact on decision making. It helped separate what seemed exciting to me from what actually sounded valuable to other people. Some parts of the idea were simplified. Some were reframed. Some were dropped entirely. It also pushed me to stop polishing in private and move faster toward a very basic version I could put in front of real users.

My advice to first time entrepreneurs is simple: do not validate in your own head. Talk about the idea early, listen carefully, and do not get defensive when the feedback is uncomfortable. You can even use AI to pressure test assumptions, but it should support real conversations, not replace them. The faster you move from idea to real market reaction, the better your decisions will be.

I validated the idea by getting as close to the actual workflow problem as possible before trying to scale anything.

Before starting Portiva, I had a firsthand experience in a doctor’s office where the administrative side was clearly breaking down: long wait times, overwhelmed staff, and too much time spent away from patient care. Instead of jumping straight into building a full solution, I spent time on the ground understanding what was actually slowing things down and where the work kept getting stuck.

That early validation shaped everything. It kept the focus on solving specific operational problems, not building something that looked good on paper but didn’t hold up in a real clinic.

For first-time entrepreneurs, I’d recommend this. Don’t validate based on opinions or surface-level feedback. Get into the day-to-day reality of the problem you’re solving. If it’s a real pain point, it will show up quickly.

The biggest mistake I see is people trying to “validate” in their head or with a small community instead of in the market.

For me, the only thing that actually counts as validation is real-world testing at a small scale. You should put something in front of actual potential buyers and see what happens.

That also means getting comfortable with volume. You need enough attempts to generate real data, rather than just a handful of anecdotal responses. We’re talking hundreds, ideally pushing toward 1,000 touchpoints depending on the model. You also need to accept that most of those will be no’s.

As you do this, what you’re looking for is data. Are people responding at all? Are certain messages landing better? Are you getting even a small percentage of yeses that you can iterate on and learn from?

That data is what drives decisions as you continue to grow your business idea.

The most effective validation strategy I used was selling before I built anything complex.

Instead of overbuilding an offer or waiting until everything felt perfect, I focused on understanding exactly what my audience needed and then positioned a solution around that. I paid attention to the language they used, the problems they were actively trying to solve, and what was already getting a response.

From there, I sold the idea in a simple way and watched how people responded. If people were willing to commit, ask questions, and invest, that was all the validation I needed.

This approach completely changed how I made decisions because it removed assumptions. I wasn’t building based on what I thought would work, I was building based on what was already proven to create demand.

For first-time entrepreneurs, I would strongly recommend validating through action, not through future “what if” scenarios. Put something in front of your audience, see how they respond, and use that data to refine because that’s how you build something people actually want, instead of something you hope will work.

I validated my business idea by hunting through industry groups to find exactly where high-priced agencies were failing their clients. Seeing that big firms were just collecting checks for lazy, automated management confirmed there was a huge opening for a digital marketing agency that actually does the daily work to turn clicks into revenue.

This insight drove us to build a results-driven machine from day one, so every dollar spent hits the bottom line instead of disappearing into vague promises. I recommend that new entrepreneurs look for the specific areas where the big guys have become too lazy to keep an eye on the small details that actually make people money.

One effective strategy to validate a business idea is to analyse if the idea solves a real problem that many people have, that ideally isn’t being solved by anyone else. I know I have found a good business idea when I wish it already existed and I can see it being helpful everyday. I also analyse the TAM (Total Addressable Market) to make sure there is the scale for the business to be successful financially.