How To Validate Your Startup Idea In 6 Months Or Less And Save Thousands On Development Costs
complete guide for startup founders.
Why should you really focus on validate your product? Well, you're a startup founder, but I'm sure you don't like to burn money and waste time.
As someone who has worked in innovative startups in Brazil like Gympass, Voltz, and MeuSucesso, I’ve seen firsthand how easy it is for founders to jump straight into product development without validating whether there’s real demand for what they’re building.
I’ve watched startups invest hundreds of thousands of dollars into creating complex features, only to realize that they weren’t solving a real problem for their users.
CB Insights says that 42% of startups fail due to a lack of market demand. This is a shocking statistic that highlights the importance of validating your product before investing in development.
In my 10 years of experience as a product designer across industries like healthcare, education, and e-commerce, I’ve developed a strategic approach to product validation.
I’ve seen what works, and I’ve seen what doesn’t. By the end of this article, you’ll understand how to validate your product in just 6 months or less, avoiding the costly mistakes I’ve seen others make, and ensuring that your product resonates with your market and grow with it.
The Most Common Problems Startup Founders Face
Anxiety And Lack Of Experience Working With Tech Products: Many founders are not from tech field, and they believe that creating an app is easy, and just because they needed it someday, they have found a good market demand.
Overestimating Market Demand: Founders often believe their idea is groundbreaking, but market validation proves otherwise;
Developing The Wrong Product: Startups can spend months developing features that users don’t need or want;
Wasting Money On Full Product Builds: Building a full-fledged product before testing it leads to expensive revisions or total product abandonment;
Slow Product Launches: Without quick validation, startups delay product launches, missing opportunities to pivot and adapt to market feedback.
Here's how you can be saved from costly mistakes and ensure your product truly addressed user needs.
Step 1: Discovery Phase
I'm sure you already know that market research is an essential task in any project development. However, good market research doesn't stop at finding a problem or an opportunity. You have to go a bit deeper.
Here's the importance of Discovery, a phase where we gather as much information as possible about the market and users before building anything.
While your competitors may invest heavily in a single idea, you'll be uniquely positioned to develop and test multiple concepts in a cheaper way, increasing your chances of finding the best solution.
How The Discovery Phase Really Looks Like
Market Size Analysis: Look at the market from a broad perspective rather than taking a segmented view based on the initial opportunity. This way, you have a better understanding of the whole and can find the best positioning – the one that is most profitable, has the most demand, and is least competitive. Sometimes, it is important to take a step back before diving in deeper.
Trend Analysis: Identify trends shaping your industry over the next 5 years. This helps you create a future-proof product. Research macroeconomic factors, new technologies, human behaviors or regulatory changes affecting your space. This has always been a big differentiator factor of me: I'm a futurist and very tuned with future trends, giving me the skillset to create future scenarios.
Example: FluentHealth, a healthtech startup, conducted a study about the rise of telemedicine and digital health. The trend analysis allowed them to develop a mobile app that fit the growing demand for patient-driven healthcare solutions.
Lean Competitor Analysis: Benchmark and compare your business, brand or product idea with what competitors are offering. Understand their strengths and weaknesses, and identify gaps where your product can excel. This is the best way to find you market positioning.
Example: During my time at Gympass, competitor analysis was crucial in finding gaps within the corporate wellness space. This process helped us position the product differently from our competition, offering unique user experiences.
Pricing Analysis: Study how much people currently spend to solve their problem. This helps in defining your pricing strategy.
Example: GoStudent, an edtech platform, used competitor pricing benchmarks to define the entry-level cost for their personalized learning solution, attracting a wide user base by offering better value.
Opportunity Mapping: Mapping real opportunities in the market ensures you’re building a product people actually want. Here you will identify real market demands, and you will reduce your risk absurdly. From this map, you will build your hypothesis and conduct user research and tests – this is the key for real market demand.
Example: Validation Cloud, a Web3 infrastructure startup, conducted opportunity mapping to identify inefficiencies in the current blockchain infrastructure market. This allowed them to focus on building scalable, enterprise-grade solutions.
After gathering this data, you can define your mission and market positioning — essentially, the DNA of your product. This positioning will drive decisions across business, brand, product development, and company culture.
With 10 years of experience, I can confidently say that defining a company's mission is far more valuable than creating a product — because the product will inevitably change.
Step 2: MVP Is For The Next Level
You don't have to go straight into building a full Minimum Viable Product (MVP). You can easily start with low-fidelity prototypes. This is where the real product design should start, not in the final screens.
These prototypes are quick and inexpensive to create and allows you to test multiple ideas rapidly before committing significant resources.
There is a bunch of tools and techniques inside the UX Research to do it, depending on what we want to evaluate. During my work at Voltz and other startups, I learned that low-fidelity prototypes and rough drafts drawning with the potential clients can provide valuable insights early in the process, minimizing risk and avoiding unnecessary development costs.
Why Low-Fidelity Prototypes Work?
Low-fidelity prototypes are simplified, stripped-down versions of your product idea. They can be as simple as hand-drawn sketches or wireframes, focusing on the overall user experience and core interactions rather than fully developed features. These allow you to quickly gather feedback, refine your concept, and pivot if necessary — all before writing a single line of code.
This prototype tests can be done in days or weeks, speeding up the problem and solution discovery much more faster.
Benefits of Low-Fidelity Prototyping
Cost Efficiency: Creating paper prototypes is inexpensive compared to developing a full MVP, especially if you're testing multiple ideas simultaneously. It allows you to explore different directions and understand which idea resonates the most with your target audience.
Speed of Feedback: By putting low-fidelity prototypes in front of potential users, you can collect valuable insights much faster. Users can quickly interact with your paper prototype, highlighting potential issues or areas of improvement. This speeds up the feedback loop and prevents you from wasting time on unvalidated features.
Test Multiple Ideas: One key advantage of low-fidelity prototyping is the ability to test several ideas in parallel. While many startups focus on a single idea from the start, my experience has shown that testing multiple approaches allows for greater flexibility and more informed decision-making.
User-Centric Validation: One of the most valuable lessons I’ve learned is that you are not your user. No matter how confident you feel about an idea, real users can provide insights that you may not have anticipated. Paper prototypes help simulate the user's experience in a simple, digestible format, allowing you to gather their reactions early on.
The Process of Paper Prototyping
Sketch the Idea: Start by sketching the core functionality of your product on paper. Keep it simple—focus on user flow, key screens, and interactions.
Test With Users: Show the paper prototype to potential users and ask them to interact with it as if it were a real app. Have them explain their thoughts as they go through the experience.
Iterate: Based on user feedback, iterate and refine the prototype. Since the prototype is paper-based, it’s easy to make quick changes and test new versions.
Validate Multiple Concepts: This process allows you to test multiple ideas without committing to any particular one. Once you identify the concept that resonates the most, you can move forward with higher confidence.
Starting with low-fidelity prototypes and conducting paper prototype tests offers no drawbacks.
It's a safe, cost-effective method to gather valuable feedback early on, dramatically reducing expenses and time invested in unproven ideas.
After validation, you can progress to more sophisticated prototyping and, ultimately, full-scale development, now with the mission to find a best tech-quality solutions, not to validate the idea.
Step 3: Continuous Discovery
Once your sketch is validated, your work doesn’t end there. Continuous market research is vital to ensuring your product evolves based on user feedback, refining your product based on user behavior and new trends.
How To Do Continuous Discovery
Weekly User Interviews: Regularly engage with your users to gather real-time feedback on their experiences.
Example: GoStudent conducted weekly interviews with students and educators to refine its AI algorithms for personalized learning, ensuring it met real user needs.
Validate Before Building: Always validate features with users before adding them to the product.
Example: Validation Cloud used continuous feedback to ensure their blockchain infrastructure met enterprise requirements before scaling.
Pivot Fast: If your MVP isn’t solving the right problem, pivot quickly. I’ve seen this happen multiple times across my career, and the key is recognizing when to adjust course.
The key lesson from successful startups is clear: more discovery, less development. This is the essence of Lean UX.
Step 4: Optimize And Prepare For Launching
Once your product is validated, it’s time to optimize for growth. This phase involves refining your product, building out new features, and preparing your startup to launch.
Make sure to identify the best channels for growth, whether it’s through inbound marketing, partnerships, or other methods. Also, lean growth strategies are necessary to scale your user base without overspending on acquisition.
Finally…
I hope this article helped you somehow. I believe that starting a startup doesn't mean overspending, overwork and underslepts. It's truly possible to use intelligence and creativity to transform an idea or insight in a powerful business.
And if you're a startup founder in seed level…
I have a proposal for you. I have a few spots left for my 6-months consultancy program, where I lead your startup from scratch to your first 50 clients.
Want to learn more how it works? Click here to enroll for a spot.
Amazing content, thanks Gabriela for sharing. Great read to understand whether you have product market fit!