
Ask HN: How would you validate a B2B startup idea? - MediumD
A lot startup advice I&#x27;ve seen over the years (The lean Startup, IndieHackers, etc), suggests that you shouldn&#x27;t spend time building the product before doing some sort of validation. The typical example is creating a early signup page and seeing how many people are interested. However, this doesn&#x27;t seem like it applies to B2B companies trying to carve out a new space (I.E. Slack). How many people would have signed up for a chat client, if Slack had tried to validate their idea before building? Is there a better approach for validating B2B ideas that would be attempting to create a new category?
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genbit
Is there already a budget for this kind of tools? Marketing? Sales? R&D
budgets? etc. If there is - who makes a purchase decision and who will be the
user? Try to find contact with these people, setup a meeting and talk to them
to understand - how they are solving this problem today, what tools they are
using? How much do they pay? What is the biggest problem with the current
solution? etc.. - more you learn, more you validate your idea and partially
market.

Try to have several such conversations. Then you can build a "sales" demo - it
can be a presentation with slides, or it can be quick demo-prototype (it's
possible to develop it in 1-2 weeks in some cases). Then you can setup a
meeting with the most friendly potential customer from previous conversations
and do the first demo run with them, then refine demo based on feedback and do
it again

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afarrell
In Slack’s case, there were existing solutions that companies had paid money
for like hipchat or IRC. So existing competition is one way.

If you find that a company is spending skilled time (translation:money) on a
crappy internally-cobbled together verson of your product, even better.

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anthony_franco
Ideally, you need to validate your product on whatever channel you intend to
use.

So if you expect to get signups mainly through your website, you need to test
that channel as early as possible.

Eventually you'll be getting hundreds (millions?) of signups through your
website. So getting just a dozen for your beta list should be easy. If it's
not, then you need to either pivot or find a better channel.

But if your website isn't the way you expect to gain users, then try a
different channel.

And I don't think Slack is a good example since Campfire and Hipchat were
already in use many years earlier.

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anil_mohammed
The reason to create a new category is because the current categories don't
solve the problem for a specific target audience. When diving into such
uncharted territory, due diligence should be performed from the founder's end.
This is where the lean startup idea is coming from. It is hinting that go out
and tell your potential users that they have an unmet need, how their needs
are unmet, and how your solution will meet those needs. If truly the need is
met with your new solution, then you will hear that and this is where you ask
for commitment. The potential user said that you are meeting an unmet need and
they are on board, then ask them to sign up. This can go beyond just a signup
on a soon to be coming page. You can actually ask the user to pay upfront or
commit to pay upfront and if you meet requirements XYZ then they will pay. A
lot of startups I talk to had not even started to code, until they had two
willing to pay customers. Our site
[https://www.waccal.com](https://www.waccal.com) is a free site so we didn't
ask for payment up front, but we did have a signup for beta page. From which
we had over 100 signups and knew there was a need.

To add on further, we wrote an article about idea versus execution and it
dives into this towards the end. Here is the link:
[https://medium.com/waccaler/idea-is-only-a-small-piece-of-
th...](https://medium.com/waccaler/idea-is-only-a-small-piece-of-the-puzzle-
for-startups-the-rest-is-execution-b498b9dd60c1)

I do agree with afarrell's comment that there was already existing solutions
in slack's market. Slack just did it better and met a lot of needs that were
not met. Also, slack is a marketing machine, which can explain a lot of their
traction as well.

