On building product: Product validation

I've been trying different methods to validate product ideas over the years. One lesson I learned is that many methods are ways to avoid launching the product.

It's a scary step for many of us building products to find out if what we built is going to be used as much as we thought. We have all sorts of ways to avoid the launch. Ranging from prototyping to waitlists, idea-only launches, focus groups, customer interviews, and questionnaires.

In teams, I've seen weeks go into customer research, and the feature itself wasn't widely adopted after release, as everyone hoped.

One possible reason this happens is that when there is nothing real to see, both builders and potential users overthink the end result. We also tend to overestimate the importance of problems while talking about them.

When the feature is ready, we discover the problem wasn't painful enough, or we completely misunderstood what the customers actually wanted in the first place.

This is not to say these validation methods are not useful. It's just that most of the time, real validation starts only after building something real and asking people whether they want to use it and actually pay for it. That's when we get feedback that will validate the idea and give meaningful direction to the product development.