Validate it in 48 hours
Find out whether anybody wants it before you spend six weekends finding out they don't.
What this course is
A weekend, spent finding out whether the thing you want to build has anybody waiting for it.
The technical people who read this catalogue are unusually good at building and unusually bad at this. The failure is nearly always the same: six weekends spent on something nobody had agreed to pay for, discovered at the end rather than at the start.
What you'll leave with
- A costly-signal test — something you asked real people to do that cost them something.
- A conversion figure from asked to committed, with the exact wording you used.
- An honest verdict, including a written account of why your result might be wrong.
What this does not promise
That you will find demand. Roughly half of honest validations come back negative, and that is the course working — a clean no in a weekend is the most valuable outcome on offer here.
The weekend
Free, and if the answer is no you have saved six of them.
- Enthusiasm is not demand — Every signal that costs the giver nothing tells you nothing, and almost all the ones people collect are free. (20 min)
- The forty-eight hours — Ask twelve people. Not a survey, not a post — twelve conversations with a real ask at the end. (25 min)
- Reading your own result honestly — The hard part is not running the test. It is believing a result you did not want. (20 min)
Related writing
- The 48-hour test that beats asking people if they'd use it — Enthusiasm is free, so it means nothing. Four validation tests that cost the other person something, ranked by how much signal they carry.