How to validate your startup idea as a first-time founder

It’s never been easier to build something new, with AI-assisted code editors like Cursor, Windsurf, and Zed enabling teams to accelerate development velocity dramatically. But no matter how quickly you can build, the same fundamentals hold true as 2005—if your product doesn’t solve an urgent need for your customers, it’s never going to sell at scale. 

We’ve recently been speaking to dozens of founders about their startup experiences and what they’ve learned so far. Many of them have gone through accelerators like Y Combinator and Antler, and are now raising notable rounds and generating 6-7 figures in revenue. In almost every conversation, founders have emphasized the importance of investigating and validating your idea in the early stages of the startup journey. 

Market research is obviously important, but still, many first-time founders don’t know where exactly to start, or how to turn raw user conversations into quantitative data. If they don’t validate their idea before development, founders risk spending countless cycles building an innovative solution that doesn’t actually solve a real-world problem. So we’ve consolidated the advice from our conversations with founders into three clear best practices you can use to validate your startup idea and build a more successful product.

Do user research, then do more

You can do all the market analysis and competitor research you want, but for startup founders, the best learnings will come from speaking to target users. Gaining an understanding of users’ pain points, goals, and workflows will help you develop a product that meets their biggest needs. 

As an early-stage founder, you have the flexibility to engage users directly, be a fly on the wall, and learn their processes in-depth. As Paul Graham explains in his 2013 blog Do Things that Don't Scale, “the feedback you get from engaging directly with your earliest users will be the best you ever get.” 

For many of the founders we’ve spoken to, the key to successful user research is volume. Hannah Sorkin, co-founder of sports partnership platform Playmaker, initially spoke to about 30 potential customers before setting out to build their product. But an investor advised they increase that number to beyond 100. The team ended up doing over 200 discovery calls, 150 of which were before they started building. 

This deeper understanding helped them build a product that was a perfect fit for their users’ needs. Hannah explains, “we wanted to make sure we were building a true solution based on a problem that people have, as opposed to a solution in search of a problem.” Now, she says, “When we show potential customers our product, you can see the reaction in their eyes—‘you hit the nail on the head, this solves all the things I currently hate about existing solutions.’”

Similarly, Atul Raghunathan, co-founder of enterprise sales platform Hyperbound, performed around 2,000 user interviews, as encouraged by their YC partner. Atul explains that “those user interviews really taught us about the space, and prevented us from building out an incredible product only to find that no one wanted it.”

Translate information into insights

2000 user interviews is a lot of raw information. Once you start gathering feedback from users, you need a methodical process for translating information into objective insights. Otherwise you risk overindexing on information from users that made the loudest point or told the best stories. 

Atul ran into this problem first-hand and needed a way to separate signal from noise. Along with his co-founder, Sriharsha, he documented every conversation in a table that reported on the number of times each pain point was discussed. This data allowed the team to have unbiased discussions about the problems that people wanted to solve.

“It wasn’t about someone making a really convincing point about a problem. It was about the data showing what the problems are,” he explains.

Another great way to gather actionable data on user behavior is to make your product available for free sign-up and analyze how users interact. When Tanguy Chau was initially building Paxton, an AI legal assistant, he needed to learn more about what users were looking for in an AI solution. After initially trying to sell to large banks via a traditional enterprise sales motion, he decided to make the product available for free to small law firms in an effort to accelerate momentum and gather user feedback. Many firms were quick to adopt Paxton into their workflows and begin using the solution, which allowed the team to gather insights on the data sources, features, and functionality needed to support the audience.

Tanguy explains, “Product Led Growth is a great way to build a startup. The feedback from our customers has been the single biggest driver of features we've implemented in Paxton. This has helped shorten our iteration cycle significantly.”

Know when it’s time to start selling

Although investing time in user research at the beginning of your startup journey is critical for building a successful product, it’s also important to know when it’s time to bring your minimum viable product to market and see if people are willing to pay. 

Many early-stage founders can get bogged down in R&D in pursuit of the perfect product before going to market and trying to sell. This is especially risky for technical founders, who may find the building stage exciting but hesitate to approach people and sell.

But as Shaun Lane, CEO and Co-founder of AI travel company Riviera, explains, “your belief about your product being good enough or not doesn’t represent how good it actually is. Your product’s value is purely a function of whether people are willing to pay for it or not. You may think your product sucks, but if people are willing to pay for it, it’s an objectively good product.”

On the other hand, “you could spend months and months building something, and you could think it’s the best product ever, but if no one's going to pay you for it, then what’s the point?” 

While conducting research at the beginning of your startup journey is important, bringing your minimum viable product to market and treating sales as a form of feedback is critical, as it allows you to get an objective measurement of your product’s value. 

As Conor Brennan-Burke, Co-founder and CEO of AI agent startup Hyperspell, describes, “Reality is messy, and your mental model is rarely a good fit for how the world actually works. You cannot think your way to the right answer. You have to act first, and action creates information.”

If you’re looking for more tools on startup building, you can check out our Blueprint for First Time Founders, in which Every Founder and CEO Rajeev Behera shares numerous tips and resources on how to start a company built to last.