You might be a student still in learning mode and are dipping your toes into knowledge and education and exams and assignments and other college life stuff, or be a fresher who has just graduated and looking to carve a career path and get your first internship/job, or a veteran working professional who has all the necessary skills, experience and real-world knack of handling problems to scaling businesses to profitability for your employer. You can be an inexperienced intern, or you can even be a CEO. It might have crossed your mind sometime in life to start something of your own, which you can call it as yours and have built it from the ground up.

We have all dreamed of such a scenario, but how many of us act on it? Well it depends on a lot of circumstantial issues too. Some of us do not have the freedom, or time, or money, or idea, or even just moral support and guidance among our circles to help us build a startup yet. But, that shouldn’t stop us from dreaming or even bouncing off ideas whenever we can. After all, ideas are free, and dreams cost no resources. I believe that we should never stop thinking of ideas, and maybe when some fine day when the time and place is right, we can act upon those ideas to make it a reality.

To those brave ones, who have come out of running around this procrastinating circle, and finally want to give it a go and execute their ideas instead of them being just another thought in your mind, we are writing this Startups 101 series, to help and guide you towards a right entrepreneurial path.

Finding Ideas

We carry on living our lives everyday and hangout around other humans regularly. Everyone is trying to accomplish one or the other thing in those available 24 hours each day. We as founders should try to observe these daily routines of ourselves and the people around us, and see the things they do, day in and day out. Now try to categorize these daily tasks, and see which one of these tasks can be done more efficiently, by either eliminating one step among it, or by integrating it with an existing tool/technology, or by automating it, or just simplifying the overall process of that particular task.

This is the first step towards building a startup. Find a problem to solve. That is all there is to it at this stage. Nothing less, nothing more. A simple hack to a daily problem. Forget numbers, forget revenue, forget all startup jargon, and keep it very simple. This will help you focus on the niche problem, and help you understand how to solve them in a better way than it already is being done currently. You crack this code, and viola, you have found your idea finally!

Why To Validate Your Ideas?

You have until now ideated the problem you are facing or maybe someone around you is facing it, and now have come up with a better solution to it. Amazing! But this solution has all been only in your head as of now. Your crucial job now is to work on validating that particular idea. Why is it important? Because as humans, we tend to love our ideas, without being self aware if those are even the right ones to solve, or are important enough for someone else to care about it.

What we need is a reality check, a true validation by others. Why? Because whatever you’re going to build, you want others to use it too. If not, what is even the point of it? Well, you can solve a problem you face yourself, and find a solution for it, which is well and good. But our goal here is to make others be interested in your solution too. Which is why we need to validate our ideas, the most crucial part of the ideation stage. If the validation fails, we scrap the problem and move on to the next one, without wasting much time, energy or money into it.

How To Validate Your Ideas?

As stated above, we tend to love our ideas a bit too much because of personal bias. By validating it publicly, we tend to understand the most important aspect of ideation - Does anyone else care about this as much as I do? If yes, then you have hit a jackpot, and are on the first step towards building a successful startup. Now, how do we validate our ideas? It is actually quite simple. Just talk about it, as much as you can. Not the solution, but the problem. So many first-time founders make these two mistakes which I will list down, they eventually just eat up their time and resources at the end of this long painful journey of entrepreneurship.

The first mistake these first-time founders make is be afraid that their idea might get stolen. And never want to talk about it openly, eventually depriving that idea from validation. If nobody learns about these problems you are trying to solve, then how do you even make sure that these problems are important enough for others. Maybe they feel that the problem isn’t big enough for them to have it solved immediately, or even shell out money for it. Ideas are dime a dozen, execution is all that matters. And even if you hide this idea from everyone else, you will have to someday launch it publicly, and then what? You don’t always get a first movers advantage, if there is someone else with a bigger resource or distribution or even just brings along a better solution to the problem than you have. So, unless you are building something really extraordinarily unique, at which point you need to patent the solution to protect it from theft, in 99% of the cases, it is foolish to hide your ideas and not validate it.

The second mistake early founders make is, try to validate their ideas in a wrong approach, by talking about the solution even before the problem. You will face personal bias in this approach, because humans are designed to be more agreeable in nature. Especially family and friends, whom generally most people approach to validate their ideas. This idea sounds so cool, I will definitely use it, they say. But when you actually launch the product, crickets! Because they gave an openly vague commitment, nothing concrete, and didn’t put money where their mouth is. Or maybe they aren’t even your target market. They just agreed with you to not disappoint you, or to just get out of that awkward situation. Meanwhile we have been assuming that we have successfully validated the idea, and are ready for market, and burning our cash and time. But eventually there is nothing but disappointment at the end of this road most of the time, because there is no proper traction, or conversion or interest in what you've built.

Talk about the problem as much as you can, and see how many more people face this same problem, and then see if they find it worth it to be solved, so much that they are even ready to pay money for this problem to go away. If you can crack this, then you are on the way to validating your idea, and having confirmation that others need it too. Do not first build a solution, and then go find a problem around it. It usually never works, and is almost always a waste of time.

Where To Validate Your Ideas?

Family and friends are nice to bounce your ideas around, but not necessarily to validate them professionally. What you need to do is, go find the place where your target audience hangs around, and then pitch them with the problem, and try to validate it by measuring the worth of that problem. You would not find a problem around infant babies, and then go pitch it to young students or single men right? You would get better traction and validation if you approach pregnant women, new mothers, and in general the adult female crowd in their 20s to 40s. Those are your target market who will be facing the problems frequently, which you’re trying to solve. Find a particular target audience to your problem, and research which places they can be majorly found. It can either be physical locations, online communities, specific groups, or at targeted events.

You can also use surveys, run targeted ads, build landing pages and collect waitlists, or use specific paid market research resources abundantly available. Spending a bit of money here is better than wasting time building MVP's which nobody needs. Eventually go talk to around 20-50 people in your niche target, and see how often they face this issue. When they badly want a solution for it, only then tell them that you are building a solution around it, and will reach out to them once it is built. Collect their contact details, emails, or just socials. This collected data is crucial for you, because once your MVP is built, these same people can be your early adopters and probably evangelists too. They have trusted you to share their problems, and are even willing to try out a solution. They have helped you validate your idea.

One more necessary and most important area of finding validation is through competitors. Are there already existing competitors in the market? That is not a problem to avoid generally (unless it is very saturated), and is in fact a very good sign that the market is real and people are ready to pay for a solution. Do not ignore those competitor markets. Go check out their 1-star reviews, and customer complaints online, and see what they're doing wrong which you can make better. Building solutions taking those gaps of competitors into consideration can help your MOAT.

Is Validation Enough?

You have to always remember, validation is just the first step of building a successful startup, and validating does not mean that the solution is perfect, or it might become an unicorn. It just means that there is evidence that this problem exists vastly and needs to be solved. Validation is there to help you stop wasting time on building useless things which nobody wants, and instead focus on the real problems. Eventually your validation is not a guarantee of a successful startup conversion. At least not in the current form you’re building. You should always be ready to accept this truth, and then iterate or pivot as per market needs and demand. Do not be infatuated with an idea which nobody else cares about, and keep wasting your resources on it. You can always try to validate the next idea or opportunity that comes along. Keep trying, and don’t give up after your first failure. Many big founders didn’t after their initial failure.

This is the first of the many resources among the Startup 101 series. You can check out more articles on this topic, as and when we keep writing and publishing it. Our goal is to provide an open, unbiased and helpful resource, which can help you build your startup, and avoid common pitfalls.