
Validate your startup idea by asking 3 simple questions - paraschopra
http://paraschopra.com/blog/entrepreneurship/validate-startup-idea.htm
======
DanielBMarkham
I didn't like this, and I'm struggling with how to explain it. After all,
these are excellent and insightful questions.

I think the reason is that people are unable to answer these questions -- it's
the type of question that can only easily be answered by an outsider, or by
somebody two years after their startup idea didn't work. So while the
questions themselves may be very good -- perhaps as a way to help your friends
-- asking them to yourself doesn't seem very worthwhile.

Especially troubling was the one about loving what you're doing. The more
infatuated you are with some idea of yours, the worse off you are. A better
question might be whether or not you can stick it out for the years necessary
for things to happen. Yes, if you love something that's all great, but reality
distortion fields are not so fun to live in when the world is tremendously
apathetic to your cause. A character that can work hard and pivot on something
they logically feel might work is much more desired, in my opinion, than
simple "love what you do". My dog loves fetching sticks. It really doesn't add
that much value.

Having said that, you should love the value you provide -- the part about
people wanting what you make. But that's just being a good person.

I don't know. I'm sorry to be so critical. The article just didn't sit well
with me.

I'm sticking with "Make something people want that scales easily." I can
derive questions from that starting point.

~~~
rgraham
My feeling is that the first question is only answerable by the market. That
answer is never certain. You're only as sure as the effort/time/money you put
into reaching the market to answer it.

The second question is easier to get an estimate for, but you probably defined
your market incorrectly (especially if you're not solving your own problem).

The last one is sticky. It reminds me of BSG. The human capacity for self-
deception is without bound...

That said, it's still useful to struggle with these questions periodically.
Startups are all about the fight. You'll never have certain answers. Measure,
learn, and adjust.

~~~
dhimes
What is BSG?

~~~
dirtyaura
Battlestar Galactica, I assume. The story is about self-deception among other
topics.

~~~
dhimes
Ha! No shit. I thought it was some business-related term... Thanks for
clearing that up.

------
mgkimsal
Nothing wrong with asking these questions, but my experience has been that
most people do not know how to judge their situations to answer honestly,
anyway. I've talked to a number of people in startup-phase over the last year,
and always ask variations of these questions, and when one with a hard answer
comes up, I typically get something like "you're a downer", "you're too
negative", "you don't understand the market", etc. Or variations of "just do
XYZ!", where XYZ, realistically, has been tried by dozens of parties before,
resulting in them losing loads of money and leaving the market altogether.

Inevitably, we end up reading stories from people here every few months with a
spin on "startups are _hard_. however hard you think it will be, multiply that
by _10_. etc". And they're right. Whether those people have succeeded or
failed, they blog about how hard everything is. We see stories about "I
thought XYZ would take me $t and $o weeks, but it was much
longer/harder/difficult than I could have imagined".

One might conclude that anyone who actually had real numbers behind how much
time and effort an idea would take to bring to market, no one would, and one
might be right. But just asking the questions designed to get people to think
about these sorts of things generally doesn't help people too much - at least
in my experience. Might just be the people I talk to, but many of them seem to
be more in love with the idea of "startup!" rather than actually building a
business around providing value, _especially_ if that business/value doesn't
look/sound/feel _exactly_ like the idea in their head from 6 months earlier
(in "lean startup terminology", they're not open to "pivot", probably).

~~~
paraschopra
My experience has been different. If a person is in maniacal love with an idea
(not not the business), then of course my entire post is irrelevant. It is
only applicable if the person him/herself wants an honest introspection of
whether what they are doing is right or not.

A founder puts in a lot of effort into an idea and the gets disappointed when
entire world ignores that idea. Instead of getting generally frustrated or
feeling disoriented, asking these simple questions can at least provide a
direction to the founder.

~~~
mgkimsal
If they've not asked these questions of themselves during the first few weeks,
that's fine. If they've not asked themselves these questions in the first 3-6
months of work, there's problems.

Whether or not they've asked these questions can usually be found in some sort
of action plan they're working. I don't care if it's 10 words on a whiteboard
or a 10 page 'business plan' - it generally shows they've thought about market
size, steps to reach the market, potential value, etc.

Someone external to them asking these questions _might_ help reorient their
thinking, but if someone's capable of going months long in to something
without the capability of doing some of their own introspection, they've got
bigger problems than just this particular startup/project.

We may have worked with different people (likely very true), but this has been
my own experience. There's 5 startups I've talked to over the last year beyond
just a cup of coffee style meetings - multiple meetings, talking financials,
markets, plans, code, etc. Only 2 had real plans that they were executing -
the other 3 kept digging in their heels insisting I didn't "get it" or similar
reactions.

~~~
joering2
if you really got 2 out of 5 startups that had some bearings on the idea and
pro approach, then I would say you were very lucky!

as we are full sail into that era of dropouts become billionaires, I am
getting tons of emails from people who start and ends their idea on "I know
how to kill Facebook and everyone will love it".

~~~
mgkimsal
I think the numbers were a bit high... but out of 5, two are actually making
money, have repeatable processes, and have small profit at the end of each
month. Whether these will turn in to large scale concerns, I can't say (in at
least one case, probably not).

And on top of that, I'm discounting probably another 8-10 "startups" I'd
talked to during the last couple of years that - at that stage - weren't much
more than a guy hacking on code, or people with an idea. Not to disparage that
- follow your dreams - that's fine - but... only one of those struck me as
ever being able to get to a point where they could actually make sustainable
money.

------
sjwright
Whenever someone tells me about their amazing new idea that will completely
overhaul an industry or transform a marketplace, I usually have one question
for them: _What will stop your competitors (established or following) from
taking your idea and doing it (or marketing it) better?_

Answers I tend to accept are:

* Because I love this product and even if a competitor tries to compete, I'll remain three steps ahead of them at all times

* They won't believe it'll work until it's too late

* There's a lot of technology behind this, and it'd take a year to simply replicate the functionality -- let alone understand what parts of it matter

* The product benefits (at least in part) from being distanced from an established player

* We have a really good patent!

Answers I usually get are:

* Umm...

* Ahh...

* Because we're awesome!

~~~
Swizec
>> There's a lot of technology behind this, and it'd take a year to simply
replicate the functionality -- let alone understand what parts of it matter

Interesting anecdote: I used to have this answer in a startup of mine, it
really impressed everyone, except people who were good technologist. Most of
them knew that this is code for "I don't really know what I'm doing it, but
it's complicated and looks like it kind of works when you ignore half the
variables"

The problem was that even I didn't realize this until much later when one day
I looked at the tech I produced and thought "What the _fuck_ is wrong with
me!? This is much too complex. Why would I ever do this to myself?"

When talking to a tech person, the only answer you should look for is "Y'know,
I'm really worried. This tech is _so_ simple, ten year olds could code this in
their sleep ...".

tl;dr -> a tech guy who describes their tech as
"complex/advanced/superawesome" is out of their depth. It should feel scarily
trivial to them.

~~~
paraschopra
Right, I have never believed that technology per se can be a competitive
advantage. If a technically competent company (say Google, LinkedIn, Facebook,
etc.) decides to replicate your technology, they can. But the key question
here is "if" they decide to. Many companies are usually so consumed by their
own problems, that they seldom care about copying your new startup's
technology.

But in any case, as a startup you need to have differentiators apart from
technology. It can be your maniacal customer support, your ability to persuade
bloggers to write about you, your ninja like SEO skills or even your
geographical/vertical focus in market.

~~~
tensor
Google is a perfect example of technology being a competitive advantage. The
PageRank algorithm is both simple and elegant in its domain, yet the numerical
methods to compute it efficiently are much more complicated than your typical
social startup's. They had a patent on the technique from day one and the
competition took years to catch up.

You can similarly point to the big database companies. Building a good acid
compliant SQL database is hard and the big database companies had the market
cornered for a very long time.

More recently, we have companies like Palantir which provide very
sophisticated algorithms to their clients. Some algorithms are not just
complicated from a software point of view, but you also need to understand the
math to replicate them. It's not possible to reproduce them over the weekend
even for an expert the domain.

The other things you listed are _also_ very important, of course. But
technology itself can certainly be a very competitive advantage. You simply
don't see that many examples of it because this sort of technology is _hard_.

------
revorad
I like PG's analogy for the first two points - think of your product as a
rectangle. One side is how much it improves people's lives (value) and the
other is how many people use it (market). The bigger the rectangle, the more
valuable your startup. For some products which have high social value,
increase in one automatically leads to increase in the other.

The last one (having fun) may seem tangential, but in my experience can have a
big positive impact on no.1. It's so much easier to keep pushing hard when
it's fun.

Edit: See point 4 - <http://paulgraham.com/13sentences.html>

~~~
cperciva
Side note about the first axis: When you measure how much you're improving
people's lives, remember to look at how much you're improving them _compared
to if people used the best available alternative_ , not compared to nothing at
all.

The main selling points for Tarsnap are that it's secure and easily
scriptable; for most people those are far less important than "having backups
will prevent data loss", but that last property is something which any good
backups would provide, so it's part of the ignored baseline.

~~~
revorad
I disagree. You only have to compare your product to what prospective users
are currently using. For a lot of products, the most common answers are
nothing, email and Excel.

It's hard for technical founders to accept that people may choose your product
for reasons other than it's the "best". For the user the only delta that
matters is quality of life before and after using your product, even if there
are ten better products out there.

~~~
paraschopra
What you are saying is that market doesn't generally have perfect knowledge
about alternatives available. How aware is a market depends on what kind of
market it is.

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Void_
Mirror link: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?sclient=psy-
ab&...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?sclient=psy-
ab&hl=sk&client=safari&rls=en&source=hp&q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fparaschopra.com%2Fblog%2Fentrepreneurship%2Fvalidate-
startup-
idea.htm&pbx=1&oq=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fparaschopra.com%2Fblog%2Fentrepreneurship%2Fvalidate-
startup-
idea.htm&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&gs_sm=3&gs_upl=19071l19596l0l19728l6l5l0l0l0l4l188l612l0.4l5l0)

------
SMrF
Question 2: Do you think there is big enough market for the service AND the
market is easy to reach (without spending bootloads of money)?

Isn't figuring out how to convert your market into customers without going
broke the definition of the startup process? I think the answer to this
question must be "I don't know, working on it" or you're probably delusional.

~~~
paraschopra
My take on startups is little different. I like to believe that customers are
already there, you just need to find them. Converting market into customers
sounds like you need to "create" and "educate" a market which can be very
hard.

------
crazygringo
"Bandwidth Limit Exceeded"

Google doesn't have it cached. Does anyone have a mirror?

~~~
espinchi
It is actually cached:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:0eRMUuc...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:0eRMUuc1LhIJ:paraschopra.com/blog/entrepreneurship/validate-
startup-idea.htm+site:http://paraschopra.com/blog/entrepreneurship/validate-
startup-idea.htm&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=fr)

What I usually do is to find the cached version is (using this as an example)
write "site:site:paraschopra.com/blog/entrepreneurship/validate-startup-
idea.htm" in Google. The cached version appears in the right when you hover on
the ">>" arrow.

------
robomartin
Apply those questions to companies such as Google, Facebook, eBay, Amazon,
etc. and you'll reveal the futility of using three simple questions (or a
dozen) to judge the value of a startup or an idea. When doing this you have to
mentally rewind to the period in time when they were founded and let go of the
knowledge you have about the environment as it exists today.

I think there's only one way:

    
    
      Startup:  Build -> Measure -> Adjust -> Iterate.
      Failure:  Pivot -> Try again.
      Attitude: Never give up.
    

When you succeed, write a really insightful blog post telling everyone how
just three questions gave you the formula to create your instant success.

~~~
paraschopra
"Never give up" attitude can be pretty devastating, I would honestly never
recommend that to anyone.

Moreover, most startups never become Google or Facebook. They are extreme
cases and hence should be seen as such.

~~~
robomartin
"Never give up" doesn't mean that you stay with a failed idea or business. It
means that failure doesn't take you down. You learn from the failure and move
on. The vast majority of entrepreneurs fail far more often than succeed.

------
diego
I see this more as an INvalidation test. Answering yes to those questions
doesn't mean anything. Answering no to any of them is a bad sign. However,
that's not very insightful.

------
ggwicz
Validate it by making it and putting a price on it. If people are willing to
pay actual money for it, the idea is valid. If not, the idea is not.

------
jjcm
Question #0 - Will I be able to handle the bandwidth?

~~~
paraschopra
I'm guilty sir! It should be up now :)

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civilian
I'm getting a 509 "bandwidth exceeded". Can anyone copy/paste the content?

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mbesto
Great questions - but they are by no means simple.

~~~
paraschopra
Well, the answers are definitely not simple but the questions are quite simple
in my opinion.

------
billpatrianakos
These questions are fine and all but they're not the ones to ask if you want
to validate your idea. If you want validation you ask _other people_ what they
think of the idea, is it useful, would they pay, if they have the problem
you're trying to solve. Asking yourself these questions will only get you
twisting your answers to be "correct".

Point is, it doesn't matter what you think, it matters what your market
thinks. Extra points if you can identify that market.

------
marshallp
There are rock-solid ways to find out if your idea is viable.

Create indiegogo campaigns send emails to discussion forums and customers. If
your idea is needed, people will give you money.

Create websites asking for sale. If people click to purchase, you have a
viable idea.

Asking the right question is most the battle, not answering it.

------
boubountu
Those questions are valid if someone is trying to build the next Facebook.
However, I think a person should work on important problems (not necessary
hard, but important). And most importantly to like your work to reach a flow
state.

------
mansolo
Pick something you love to do. If there is market demand for it, you've
validated your idea.

Still, there are no guarantees, but it's that easy.

