A difficult concept to internalize for those first starting a startup is validation. Founders might talk to people about the idea, try and evaluate the feasibility of the idea, and get caught up in implementation details, making market need an after thought.
With my first company that focused on automating drug development for pharmaceutical companies, K and I spent many of our days reading research papers about Alzheimer’s and the nuances of beta amyloid plaques. We were learning a lot – but not exactly about our product-market fit.
After the first company, we decided to prototype a genetics product. We instead started with market need and put up a landing page for the product, set up a ‘Pre-order now’ button, ran an ad campaign, and asked people for feedback. While we had one customer pre-order our $500 product in the first few weeks, we also learned about the idiosyncrasies and doubts of our target consumers much more quickly than the first time around.
That said, whether a product can be adequately user-tested or not depends. Enterprise products that are only used by one person are easy to user test. Consumer products, on the other hand, tend to be more difficult, especially if they have a social component and require network effects for the user to realize value.