[james_impliu]

I feel like a weird industry has popped up that makes you feel like you can validate everything in advance. I think this comes from Product Managers in large, risk-averse companies that excessively try to minimize mistakes.

However, if you want to start a startup, you aren't optimizing for mistake minimization! You are figuring out if anyone cares as quickly as possible. You will only get true validation of this by seeing if people use your thing, and then iterating from there.

My advice would be - you have to _both_ talk to people and _at the same time_ create whatever your MVP is to launch as fast as possible. It might be a spreadsheet. It might be you doing stuff manually for them before building the software. Get something into their hands as quickly as possible.

[mft_]

I agree with all of this.

The vast majority of people aren’t good at being visionary, most aren’t technical, and many will give you a default culturally-aligned answer (eg positive to be nice and conflict-averse, or negative because they are tired of dealing with sales and bullshit, for example).

Therefore having some sort of MVP (even as said just a spreadsheet, or a storyboard) to help people understand what you’re even talking about and envision it in action, would be very useful.

[mmvora]

I agree with this! I think its great that you're trying to ask people for advice but honestly you want to maximise your learning from your potential customers themselves! The book 'The Lean Startup' mentions "faster learning loops" where you try to build something as fast as possible, find out whats wrong, iterate. - Book summary here: https://tdevroome.medium.com/book-summary-the-lean-startup-2...