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MASTER VALIDATION
1 FAIL EARLY, FAIL OFTEN
Your first idea will very likely not survive contact with a customer. You’ll need to learn and adapt, fast! How can you learn as much as you can about your customer, the problem to be solved, and the potential solution early on, when changing course is not so costly? This is what’s meant by failing early.
In a sense, failing in this way is not really failing. Sure, you’ll need to kiss your original idea goodbye and change direction. By doing so, you take another step on the road to success.
In validation, experiments are the tools you use to try to learn faster. Experiments allow you to “fail” in a controlled way.
2 PIVOT
When an experiment tells you that a fundamental assumption behind your idea is flawed, you’ll need to change direction: you’ll need to pivot.
A pivot can be relatively simple, like changing the price of a product, or it can be more complex. For instance, your findings might indicate that you need to approach a totally different customer segment, solve a different problem for your customer, or that the customers you’re targeting have a completely different need.
FOUR DIFFERENT PIVOTS
CUSTOMER NEED PIVOT
Feedback indicates customers don’t care about the problem you solved. Find a problem your customers do care about and are willing to pay for.
CUSTOMER SEGMENT PIVOT
Your current customers don’t care about your product, but feedback shows another customer segment is more receptive. Change your segment.
REVENUE MODEL PIVOT
The way you charge money doesn’t seem to work. Another revenue model may work better. The “free” model doesn’t generate revenue. Someone has to pay.
CONTEXT PIVOT
The market isn’t ready for your value proposition. Maybe competition was there earlier than you, or rules and regulations prevent you from entering the market. Try to find another market.
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3 PERSEVERE
Conversely, your experiment can also tell you that you are right about your assumption. In this case, you should move forward and tackle the next assumption. You should persevere and continue to move forward.
With regard to both outcomes, there is a caveat: you could also have simply done the experiment wrong. Maybe you asked the wrong people, or maybe you ran the wrong test. Before making any big decisions on pivoting or persevering, try to exclude this first.
4 DO IT AGAIN
So, when does validating your idea stop? Well, to be honest, as a designer it should never really stop. You’ll keep learning new things about your customers that will tell you how to approach them even better.
And you’ll keep making assumptions that turn out to be wrong. The good news is that every failed experiment will take you one step closer to a better outcome. 
LESSONS ON VALIDATION
Marc has launched, sold, and closed several companies, and has gone through 22 surgeries during his lifetime; he’s had to learn to walk more than four times now. Marc is literally a startup and has shared some of his lessons on validation below.
Marc: “Sometimes, when startups start out they want to build a Rolls-Royce, but I so don’t care: I just want to get from A to B. The question is, will the startup understand this, or will they fall in love with their idea.
“Teams who fall in love with their product only validate what they want to validate. They jump through hoops to confirm their idea. You need to look at it as an entrepreneur and focus on the bigger picture.
“Through validation we learn. Teams who have pivoted their business model are the most likely to succeed.”
Marc Wesselink
Recruiting & Alumni Startupbootcamp
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STORIES OF VALIDATION
STICK TO IT
We love the Post-it notes that 3M makes, because they simply stick the best. It turns out that 3M, now famous for Post-its, actually stumbled upon the idea by accident. In 1968, a 3M scientist tried to make a new super-strong adhesive, but accidentally found a glue that was “low-tack” and reusable.
Five years later, a colleague started to use the glue to hold a piece of yellow paper in place as a bookmark. That idea gained traction within 3M and pioneered a totally new product line and customer segment.
CHEW ON THIS
The famous American chewing gum manufacturer actually didn’t start out selling gum at all. At first, William Wrigley Jr. was just giving away sticks of gum as incentives with the soap he sold. Then he noticed that the gum was actually much more popular than the soap. He quickly turned around his business and started producing his own line of gum.
A CAPTIVE AUDIENCE
Today, Twitch.tv is the place where e-sports fans watch the live streams their favorite star gamers share while playing video games and performing in tournaments. E-sports fans are a very loyal audience watching millions of hours of live streams per year. Twitch.tv is a spin-off of Justin.tv, an earlier live stream, aimed at a much broader audience.
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THE PIVOT. IT USED TO BE CALLED “THE FUCK-UP.”
// Marc Andreessen, Investor, Entrepreneur, Engineer
PAYPAL
PayPal has always focused on payments, but it has gone through many permutations. It was developed by a company called Confinity in 1999 to allow people to “beam” payments from their PDAs (handheld digital computers, such as the Palm Pilot, an early incarnation of the smartphone).
After merging with a financial services company called X.com, PayPal became the preferred online payment system for eBay sellers, which propelled its name into payment processing fame.
HEAD IN THE GAME
The popular chat app for work, Slack, currently valued at $2B, started out as something completely different: a social video game, called Glitch. When it turned out that Glitch was not going to be a popular business, the company pivoted to a new name and a new product.
The funny thing is, Stewart Butterfield, Slack’s founder, made this pivot before. In 2004, he started building the game Neverending, which eventually pivoted into . . . the popular photo-sharing site Flickr.