How to Validate Business Problems Your Startup Will Solve

by Fed

Published 2021-09-23, updated 2025-01-17

What Is Idea Validation?

Markets shift and customer needs change, but one thing stays true: validation costs little compared to the confidence and clarity it provides.

The idea validation process verifies that your business idea addresses a problem customers will pay to solve. It helps you avoid investing significant time and resources into building a product no one wants.

While building GummySearch, I spoke with over 100 early-stage founders actively validating, building, launching, and growing their products.

I’ve seen two stories repeat themselves:

Some founders skip validation, spend months building their product, and launch in an empty room.
Others take the time to validate, understand their audience deeply, and launch to customers ready to buy.

This post distills everything I’ve learned from those conversations into actionable insights to help you validate your idea and avoid costly missteps.

What Happens If You Don't Validate Your Product Idea?

Skipping validation leads to silence and a trip to the Valley of Despair. This is where startup founders face the sinking realization that no one actually needs what they’ve built.

Sunk cost kicks in, and instead of pivoting, they double down, pouring even more time into something unlikely to succeed.

Should you validate your idea? Almost always, yes. The only exceptions are if you deeply understand your market and can build your MVP so quickly that it takes less time than finding people to validate with.

Idea Validation Checklist

If you’re serious about bringing your idea to life, the smart first step is validation.

The good news is, that it doesn’t have to take long. You just need to define the right problems, talk to the right people, and ask the right questions. Here’s how:

1. Find Your Target Audience for Business Problem Validation

When you focus on who you’re serving, you’ll spot meaningful problems faster, understand their urgency, and build a solution that fits into their lives.

Problems don’t exist in a vacuum! Real people experience them, and they’re the ones who’ll buy your solution in the end.

Ask yourself:

Who are these people? Where do they spend their time? What do they worry about?

Find their online communities and get familiar. For inspiration, check out The Hive Index for a curated list of online communities. And for Reddit, well, you already know GummySearch is your go-to.

With GummySearch, you can:

Build audiences from existing Reddit communities (over 100,000 of them)
Filter conversations by topics and AI-based theme
Ask direct questions to find specific answers (with a little help from our AI)

See a sneak peek below:

Reddit Wordpress Audience

These communities help you validate your distribution channels, beyond validating your solutions. If your audience isn’t there – or if conversations are sparse – it’s a signal to explore other channels:

Check Facebook groups or niche online forums
Explore industry-specific Slack or Discord communities
Look offline at local community boards or small-town Facebook pages
Ask your personal network for introductions to relevant people

2. Define the Problem Your Idea Should Solve

At this stage, you know you’re going to make something – you just don’t know what it is yet.

When documenting this, focus 95% on the problem you’re solving and 5% on your solution.

It will evolve after you talk to people. And that’s a good thing!

I like to use a problem/customer statement template for every idea I seriously consider. Feel free to steal it! Here’s the template and an example of how I fill it out.

Consider the Vitamin vs. Painkiller Debate

You’ve probably heard that some problems are vitamins and others are painkillers:

Painkillers solve urgent, costly problems that call for immediate solutions.
Vitamins are nice-to-have solutions. They make life better but aren’t critical.

For example, a product that helps people remember to drink water is a vitamin – it’s helpful, but no one’s losing sleep over forgetting to consume 2L of water. In contrast, a painkiller is a product that prevents dehydration for endurance athletes solving real, immediate pain.

While it’s true that both types of problems can succeed, painkillers are a better bet for startups. They have limited resources and runway, and painkiller or hair-on-fire problems already have customers actively searching for solutions and willing to pay for them.

Make Your Problem Research During Idea Validation Data-Driven

Even during the most iterative stages of product development, you want to make sure your ideas aren’t happening in a vacuum.

A great way to ground your research is by creating a Problem Hypothesis. It’s a guiding statement that summarizes the issue you believe exists, who it affects, and what happens if you can solve it.

Here’s a simple template:

“We believe that (Problem) happens because of (Reason). If we solve it by (Method), our customers will achieve (Outcome).”

For example:

“We believe that grocery delivery services are unreliable, causing people in remote areas to struggle to access fresh, high-quality food. If we create a meal kit solution specifically designed for rural deliveries, customers will save time, reduce stress, and enjoy healthier meals.”

A strong hypothesis keeps your research and interviews focused on the right questions. It also prevents you from jumping to conclusions too early.

Another great way to get data on the problem your idea is supposed to solve is GummySearch!

When I look for problems, I like to research pressing issues people are currently talking about.

Remember the AI-based themes I mentioned before? I can jump straight into “Pain & Anger” to find fresh problems people might be dealing with. (You can use any theme, but this one narrows my options down significantly.)

Of course, I don’t need to read through hundreds of posts to find those problems. GummySearch will offer a curated summary of what pains my audience.

3. Determine Your Biggest Risks

When defining your idea, write down the risks honestly. Your goal during validation is to disprove them through research and interviews. Consider the following:

Product risk is the risk you can’t build your product. Maybe it requires technical skills you don’t have, or an API integration isn’t available. Founders often over-focus here, rushing to build an MVP before talking to customers. Yes, it’s real, but it’s rarely the biggest issue.

In most cases, market risk and channel risk deserve more attention.

Market risk is the risk no one will pay for your product. Maybe the problem isn’t painful enough, or users expect free alternatives (like Google) and see no reason to pay you. For example, the above Pain & Anger research on GummySearch gives you an edge by helping you pinpoint pain points that people care about enough to spend money on.

Channel risk is the risk you can’t effectively find the customers who’d pay for your product or acquisition costs make it unsustainable. Founders often fall into the trap of thinking, “If I build it, they will come.” That’s rarely true.

Take this example: You’re building a meal delivery kit service for rural areas. Using GummySearch, you create an audience targeting relevant subreddits like EatCheapAndHealthy, KitchenConfidential, and MealKits, totaling over 20 million members. That’s a huge audience base.

Yet, your search for conversations about meal kits in rural areas comes up empty.

Even if you search for alternative pain-related keywords such as “food spoilage in delivery” and “long grocery trips” on Google, all you can find are isolated Reddit posts about the topic.

In this case, you’ll need to resort to broader terms if you want to find anything relevant.

That’s channel risk happening before our eyes! A lack of conversations in any topic might indicate:

Limited internet access in rural areas reduces online engagement.
Shipping logistics create hurdles, with high costs and delays.

This doesn’t mean your idea is dead. It might also mean your audience doesn’t use Reddit. You’ll need to check places like Facebook groups, local community boards, and farmer’s markets.

Risks will determine the questions you ask during your validation interviews and forum mining. More on this later!

4. Requesting Interviews During Business Problem Validation

You’ve defined your problem, identified your target customers, and know where to find them. Nice work!

Now it’s time to talk to them. But how do you ask for something as valuable as their time?

Focus on the problem, not your solution. Describe the issue you’re tackling and ask if they experience it in their day-to-day life.

The 4 “Make”s of Interview Requests:

Make them curious.
Make it about them, not you.
Make it worth their while.
Make them feel like experts.

If you’re struggling to get interviews, it’s usually because the problem isn’t real or you’re in the wrong communities.

In this case, go back to refining your problem and customer definitions.

When I launched GummySearch, I posted my interview request and filled 10 slots in just 6 hours. Then, I had some wonderful conversations with fantastic people, and stay in touch with many of them to this day!

5. Do the Interviews!

You've got your target customer on the phone (or in person, depending on your case) and you want to validate that your product is worth building.

Rule #1 – Don’t mention your product! You won’t get honest feedback that way. At this stage, your goal isn’t to validate it but to validate the problem. You’re here to deeply understand your customer’s struggles, not to pitch your solution. Nail the problem first, and the right product will follow.

Instead, ask them about their problems and how they currently solve them. Take each of the product, market, and channel risks you've defined, and ask the tough questions to disprove them.

For a great guide on talking to potential customers, read The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick. You'll learn a lot about your customers' day-to-day, pain points, current solutions, and the things that matter most to them.

Your goal is to hear this: “I have this pain point, it’s a huge thorn in my side, and I will pay handsomely for someone to solve this problem for me.” Painkillers 😉.

I recommend including some key questions in your interview:

"What emotions do you feel when you come across this problem?"
"How do you currently solve this problem?"
"Have you tried __ (competitor name)? Why? Why not?"
"How would you quantify the money/time that this problem costs you?"
"What kind of systems would you require an integration with to use a solution for this problem?"

6. Assess Feedback to Your Product Idea

At this stage, your interviews will lead you down one of two paths. Both are valuable outcomes – what matters is what you do next.

Path A: Build, Iterate, Launch with Confidence

You don’t need 10 perfect interviews, but you do need patterns. Are you repeatedly hearing the same frustrations, struggles, and desires? They are your green light.

Here’s how you know you’ve validated a problem:

Customers clearly describe the problem in their own words.
They’ve tried (and failed) to solve it themselves.
They show frustration, urgency, and a willingness to pay.
The same pain points keep coming up.
They come from reliable distribution channels.

Congrats! You’ve validated your idea. There’s still uncertainty ahead, but now you know you’re solving a problem people will pay for. You’ve likely also found insights to guide your product roadmap, integrations, and distribution strategy.

Path B: Solve Another Problem

If your interviews revealed that:

The problem isn’t real.
People won’t pay for a solution.
You can’t disprove key risks.

That’s still a win. After all, you avoided wasting months building something nobody wants.

By the way, you don’t need to start over. Small tweaks can make a big difference. Maybe you uncovered a new pain point or need to explore different acquisition channels.

Iterate on your idea, refine your questions, and talk to 10 more people.

Product Idea Validation Is a Continuous Process

Founders who skip customer conversations and focus only on the product usually end up in the Valley of Despair. And trust me, you don’t want to be there.

Customer conversations matter at every stage of your product journey. Whether you’re launching a new feature, tweaking your positioning, or testing a new distribution channel, staying connected to your audience keeps you on track.

Plus, GummySearch keeps you plugged into live conversations, helping you spot ideas for new features, products, upselling, cross-selling, and better customer experiences.

Stay close to your audience. They’ll show you the way.

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