How much to spend on validating an idea?

“Entrepreneurs are born optimistic and that can be a double edge sword.”

A brilliant idea is the starter but a successful startup well depends on other factors such as product-market fit, technology readiness, team execution and etc. Very often, we are mesmerized with our own ideas and forget that not everybody (including our target audience) thinks the same. The fast-moving market contributes to the constant mismatch of expectations between entrepreneurs and users.

Instead of investing $10-20K capital straight into developing the software, simple tools such as a landing page and market survey should be used to validate the idea. Great ideas are often required to be refined and pivoted several times before achieving product-market fit.

TenTract's COO-as-a-Service helps entrepreneurs to validate idea in one sprint (which is a two week period for $1,000) and this could help entrepreneurs save tremendous costs and time in going in the wrong direction and building the wrong product.

The Minimum Viable Product ("MVP") to be developed after the target audience validated the kind of product features they will use so that resources will not be wasted on developing or modifying the wrong features.

The best way to validate an idea however is to find the right co-founder(s) who is willing to work together with you without remuneration. While this can allow you to validate an idea without capital, you might spend a long time finding the right co-founder(s) and the time wasted could result your loss in the first mover advantage. Furthermore, new partnerships have a high failure rate when the partners' vision and commitment change.