When it comes to validating product ideas, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach. You can’t automate it. You can’t set it and forget it.

But you can still create systems and principles to speed up the process.

Like a trail of breadcrumbs, you can create shortcuts so you don’t start from scratch every time.

What does a validation process look like?

The process of validating a product idea follows predictable steps:

1. Identify a specific problem

2. Package the problem into a solution

3. Distribute the solution to an audience

4. Collect feedback and repeat

Each step has the potential for full automation or tedious manual work. It is a spectrum.

While my system won’t look like your system (and probably shouldn’t), there are principles you can use to customize it for your situation.

What and who is validation for?

Before we get to the systems, I want to highlight an assumption and some key points.

The point of validation is to save time and money by making sure you build something people want.

Nothing more. Nothing less.

But this leads to an important distinction.

On the surface, validation is a one-way street. You create a product that gets validated in the market to figure out if it can make money.

But it is a two-way street. You may not realize it, but you are also validating whether you want to work on the product with potential customers or with the people you’d need to collaborate with to build the product for the customers.

The list of potential validations is endless. But the more time I spend on building products, the more I’ve realized how important it is to validate a product from both sides of the street.

The majority of the systems I’ve built address this framing.

Step 1: Identify a specific problem

Let’s get the bad news out of the way. Finding problems is a game of pattern recognition.

To find patterns in high-leverage problems, you must get your reps in. Have conversations, Scour Reddit, read blogs, and attend conferences and other networking events.

In short, go where your audience is and listen.

The work is simple but requires a lot of effort.

The good news is once you get your reps in, there are some helpful frameworks for making the most of them.

How to create a quality problem statement

One of the most important things is how you craft your problem statement.

Going from identifying a problem in your head to writing a clear problem statement a customer can understand can be a giant leap.

The best framework I know for how to do that is using a mix of:

Once you know both things, you can concisely describe the problem.

Here’s an example:

• Job Title: Director of Customer Success

• Jobs-To-Be-Done: Needs to reduce customer churn

• Biggest pain point: Struggles with identifying at-risk customers early due to lack of data

As a problem statement:

Directors of Customer Success need to reduce customer churn but struggle identifying at-risk customers early due to lack of data.

Forcing the problem into a single statement means your scoping is concise enough to make meaningful progress on the rest of the steps. And it makes it a super easy thing to share with potential customers to kick off the validation process.

Pain killer vs. vitamins

The final thing to think about is the leverage of a problem. Some things an audience complains about are nice-to-haves. Other things are so painful they will throw their money at you. We want the latter.

You’ll be able to pick up on cues over time, and the more you look for problems, vitamins generally sound like “it would be nice if…” and pain pills sound like “a new compliance rule is forcing us to…”.

A key distinction is that vitamins are usually requests triggered by a user, while pain pills are requests triggered by the environment.

Step 2: Package the problem into a solution

This is the most important step.

Most of the “hidden” validation will happen here because it will force you to go from vague solutions to packaged realities.

I don’t complete everything in the list below for each idea, but I always do the first two items and then pick and choose others depending on the idea.

Things you can do to create a packaged solution

Option 1: Run the solution you have through a series of copywriting frameworks

To keep the piece short, I won’t dive into the details of the frameworks. But these frameworks are the first step to figuring out if your solution is enticing to another human.

If you struggle running your solution through these frameworks. Or if you produce copy that no other human finds interesting, it is time to move on or change your solution.

Option 2: Create an offer the user can’t say no to

As Alex Hormozi says, “The key to sales is making an offer so good people will feel stupid saying no.”

That is all I focus on here. Can I create an offer (or several) that would put one person in my persona in a position to feel stupid saying no?

I’ll focus on packaging up unique features, different pricing models, and adding incentives from different growth strategies.

If I can’t make an offer that guarantees an imaginary person says yes to my offer, why would a real person say yes once I launch it?

Option 3: Create your most emotive assets

Anyone can complete the first two exercises regardless of skill, but this is the first one that is dependent on your skillset.

I’m a developer with plenty of experience using Figma and other Adobe tools. For me to put together a quick UI flow in those tools takes almost no time. So I always start creating wireframes with a technical eye towards what is possible.

But I struggle sketching things. So, someone with more drawing ability can create sketches that could be useful to potential customers.

Or, a graphic designer can create ads to test the idea on Meta, Google, or other platforms.

Either way, the goal is simple. Producing assets is another filter to figure out if the idea has legs. And those assets can live on their own to do some of the validating for you in later steps.

Option 4: Create a landing page with a CTA for your offer

If all the other steps look promising, I will move on to this step. I understand this could sound daunting, but think loosely about the term “landing page.”

You can use services like Carrd to build legit landing pages but I’ve seen Notion pages served up and get the job done just fine.

Don’t overthink it.

The goal is to take make a place where you can take everything you completed in the earlier steps and place them all under one roof. Then have one ask where you are either asking for a sign up to a waitlist or to complete a survey about the problem. Both of which offer great signals for validation.

Now, in the distribution step, you have something you can distribute, scale, and sell for yourself. This is where the automation part of the system can start to take off.

Step 3: Distribute the solution to an audience

You need to get your copy, assets, or landing page in front of as many people in your audience as possible.

Feel free to email, text, or call anyone you know who can react to what you have but there are tools that help to speed this process up.

Here are some that I use:

• LinkedIn sales navigator

• Database tools with leads like Apollo

• Reddit

• Use advanced Google searches like: “Name of job title” forum or “Name of job title” community

Whatever tool you use, remember your problem statement in step 1. You want to search for job titles and only reach out to those job titles.

Find as many emails as possible and present your assets or problem statement. When you reach out, it’s important to be upfront with where you are in the process. Please don’t promise full-fledged platforms when you only have a logo and some copy.

If the pain is strong enough, they will be happy to build with you, which is a great sign for idea validation.

Step 4: Collect feedback and repeat

If you create a simple feedback form for the solution or the problem, it is the perfect pairing to the assets you already have.

Your CTA can be asking people to complete the form to get feedback on how you defined the problem and the solution.

Plus, like some of the other steps, writing the survey is a form of validation. If you can’t think of the most potent questions to ask about the problem or your proposed solution, it might be time to revisit step 1.

The simplest way to set this up is to create a Google Form and connect it to your assets or landing page. You can also use Zapier to connect form submissions to other tools you use to track all the responses.

I will update these tools and systems as I come across new ideas.