Ten conversations beat six months of building

The most expensive thing in a new business isn't money. It's the year you spend building something carefully that nobody was ever going to buy.

And the reason it happens isn't stupidity. It's that building is pleasant and asking is frightening. Building feels like progress and nobody can tell you no. So people build.

Ask about the past, not the future

The first rule of a useful validation conversation: never ask "would you use this?"

People say yes. They say yes because they're being polite, because it's free to say yes to a hypothetical, and because they genuinely can't predict their own behaviour. A room full of yeses has preceded approximately every failed launch in history.

Ask about what they have already done instead:

• "How do you handle this today?"
• "When did you last have this problem? Walk me through that day."
• "What did you try before? Why did you stop?"
• "What are you currently spending on this — money, hours, or a person's time?"

Past behaviour is evidence. Future intention is noise.

The three signals that actually mean something

Most answers are polite. These three aren't:

1. They have already paid for a bad solution. Someone using a spreadsheet, a subscription they complain about, or a contractor they're unhappy with has proved the budget exists. You're competing with something real, which is a much better position than competing with nothing.
2. They ask when they can have it. Unprompted. Not "that sounds useful" — "when".
3. They offer to pay before you ask. This is the strongest signal there's and it's rare.

Anything else — "interesting", "I could see that being useful", "definitely send me the link" — is a polite no. Record it as a no.

Ten conversations, then decide

Ten is enough. Not because ten is statistically meaningful, but because by the tenth you'll be hearing the same three sentences and you'll know whether one of them is "yes, and I would pay".

If it isn't, you've spent two weeks instead of a year. That's the entire trade.

Sell it before it exists

The cleanest test available: a page describing the thing, a price, and a button. The button either takes a deposit or joins a waiting list that asks for a card.

If nobody clicks, you've learned something enormous for the cost of an afternoon. If people click, you've both validation and a list of customers to build for.

Be straight about what they're buying — a pre-order with a date, not a product that exists. Taking money for something you haven't built and being vague about which is fraud, not lean methodology.

What validation doesn't tell you

It tells you whether a problem is real and whether someone will pay to have it solved.

It doesn't tell you that you can build it, that you can reach those people at a price that works, or that the market is big enough to matter. Plenty of validated ideas are validated small.

That's fine. A validated small business that pays you well is a perfectly good outcome, and it's a much more common one than the alternative everybody plans for.