I don’t think most successful products were “validated” in advance in the way blog posts describe. What usually gets validated early is not demand, but whether the founders can consistently get someone to say yes.
Code, MVPs, and even competition are secondary. Distribution comes first, and it’s almost always messier and more manual than the advice suggests. Most validation looks like pushing something imperfect until either people start pulling it, or you give up.
In hindsight we call that validation. At the time, it mostly feels like guessing with feedback.
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