Validation hierarchy

One of the things that frustrated me the most when I was just getting into entrepreneurship is the concept of customer development, which essentially says that you need to validate your business ideas by talking to potential customers. This concept is a big part of successful startup books like the Lean Startup that were then recycled into innovation programs in large corporations and startup accelerators to the point that they became a sort of startup dogma.

As a result, if you are developing an idea for a business, it is likely that at some point you will come across a startup "coach" who has never started their own business, that will tell you that you have to get out of the building and talk to your customers before you get started building your idea.

This might have been decent advice in the days of the early internet when the Lean Startup was formulated, but I don't think it holds up anymore. The reason for this is that talking to people is probably the weakest form of validation that you can get for your idea.

If I were to put together a hierarchy of the different forms of validation, it would look something like this:

• Words - talking to people
• Observations - watching how people behave
• Actions - getting people to take some kind of non-financial action that you want (e.g. give their email address)
• Money - getting people to actually hand their money over

To the Lean Startup's credit, when it was published, words were probably the best validation that you could get back before everything was online. Nowadays with the modern internet, however, it is ridiculously easy to observe people in online forums, product review sites, etc. where you can understand their needs and how current products might not be meeting them. It is also ridiculously easy to set-up landing pages where you can capture emails or even ask for pre-payments for your products or services that are not built yet.

To still rely on words when it is not only more reliable but also quicker to move further up the hierarchy is obsolete advice from people who have never built anything. Don't fall into this time trap.