Idea Validation: An Important Start for Startups

Validating ideas is an important fundamental activity for startups to do. In fact, it can be said that this phase is a crucial phase where the founder can see whether his startup idea can be well received by the market or not.

Everyone can come up with a business idea. However, without being properly validated the scalability of the idea cannot be proven. This is also the first topic in the mentoring series of the DSLaunchpad 2.0 acceleration program with Amazon Web Services (AWS). In this two-session mentoring session, DSLaunchpad 2.0 presented Pandu Sjahrir (Managing Partner of Indies Capital Partners) and Willson Cuaca (Co-Founder of East Ventures) as a mentor to share his experiences and knowledge regarding idea validation to the participants.

Starting with Confirming the Problem Statement

One of the important elements that founders must pay attention to when validating an idea is to determine the problem that the idea wants to solve. After determining the problem, founders must be able tobreak down what to know and do to realize the business idea. “First (to do idea validation) we know first what we want address, what is the issue, how big is the market, and what makes people use our goods.” said Pandu Sjahrir.

This process of defining problem statements in validation is also useful to help you look at things like:

• Will this idea be useful in society?
• Can this idea increase the efficiency of a system,
• Conduct product formula formation in advance to find differences with competitors; as well as
• As a material to convince investors of scalability.

"At the end of the day, unless you have your own funds, it's definitely (important to do) validation first because you want to use third party funds. He (a third party) will ask what made you convince with your (business) hypothesis, beyond a good presentation.” added Pandu Sjahrir.

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Interact with Consumers to Get Feedback during Validation

To validate, of course as a founder you need to interact with consumers and potential customers. Feedback from consumers in this phase can be a reference for the next iteration until the idea can actually solve the problems that are owned by consumers. Regarding this, Willson Cuaca said, “Determine the problem, build the product, then try to match whether the problem can be solved, talk to many people, get feedback, match again, right gak problem solved, so many trial and error. But problem statements it should very clear."

On the one hand, in addition to solving existing problems, asking consumers is also crucial to find out whether the products made can be accepted by the market or not. “Ask the user whether the problem they have can be solved properly. That's just the first idea and validation: product-market fit, we haven't talked about monetization and stuff." added Willson

Interact to get feedback directly from the user can also save you from biased founders, where the founders feel that their idea is the greatest, best, newest idea, and that no other founder can copy their idea. For this reason, in this process the founder should also listen to bad things related to his idea, so that he can do iterations better. Pandu Sjahrir also emphasized that this is a mistake that many founders make. “The biggest mistake many founders make is not listening to people and not listening customer." he insisted.

Execution as Part of the Initial Step of Validating Ideas

However, the idea validation process does not stop there. In fact, the most important thing for founders to do in this process is to execute the idea. In making ideas, it is possible for a founder to have the same idea as other founders. But what will differentiate the idea is how it is executed and who executes it.

Menurut Willson Cuaca, the first step in this validation process is execution. "So the first step of all that is execution of your idea, don't think it's the best idea, (then) try to validate it." Pandu Sjahrir also said the same thing. He said that in the end it's useless to have lots of ideas if they can't be executed. "At the end of the day, can have many ideas but if gak can you execute it? what for." he said.

Concerns that may arise when carrying out executions are unsatisfactory results or not as expected. However, from these shortcomings or failures, each founder can see what needs to be improved and iterated from his startup idea. “There is no such thing as 100% good execution, but there is an efficient execution, right on target, at the right time, in the right place, with the right problem, and getting good feedback from users. That feedback is used to (subsequently) carry out a good execution again.” Willson said regarding the execution to the participants of the webinar.

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Execution is crucial as part of the process of validating ideas, Willson also said that the sooner the idea is executed, the founders can learn faster for future improvements. "The more you wait, the more late you are than the others, the faster you do it, it doesn't mean you get first mover advantage of course, but you can learn faster than the person who might execute it tomorrow.” he insisted.

By validating ideas, founders can immediately identify problems and find the right solution to solve the problem. In addition, the founder must also continue to think about the mission and dreams of what they want to achieve through the business idea. However, it must also be done by executing the idea. That way, founders can continue to iterate until they find the right formula in preparing their business ideas.