419: The Missing Piece in Your Validation Strategy

Hey. It's Arvid, and this is the Bootstrap Founder. Today, we will dive into the kinds of alternative solutions that most founders miss when they attempt to validate their ideas. A quick word from our sponsor before we get started, that's paddle.com. I use Paddle as my own merchant of record for all my SaaS businesses. They take care of all the taxes, currencies, and transactions, all that kind of stuff so I can focus on building my product. Now, Paddle released a new guide just a few days ago and I think you should check it out. It's called the Grow Beyond Black Friday Guide and it contains very actionable strategies for payment conversion and billing tactics to maximize revenue and retention in the long term. But it's about seasonal sales and how to use them effectively. It's really interesting. So if you have anything to sell, check out paddle.com as your payment provider and the link to this guide is gonna be in the show notes. A lot of early stage founders have understood mostly because more and more people are talking about their early stage strategies now that you need to validate your ideas. That's very important as a founder. You need to make an effort to figure out if the thing that you're planning to do is actually reasonable to attempt. Validation has become a very important step and is absolutely worth doing prior to starting to build. I I know a lot of people love building, but you need to do some validation. That much, many people have understood. Yet, here's where things actually get interesting. Because often enough, validation looks like checking if people have this problem that you're trying to solve. Right? Checking if people have the challenge that your idea helps them overcome. And if you find people complaining about it somewhere, if you find people mentioning that they struggle with this, that usually is a sufficient reason to build a software as a service solution. That is validation. People then bring that so called validated thing to market and they realize that something frustrating is happening here. Even if they directly engage people in their market, even if they directly show this product and onboard people into it, they still don't get a sale. And people stick with what they're currently doing, even though you have something that from your perspective as a founder is much better. And the thing that they use is much worse, much more expensive, much more complicated, much less scalable. So why is that? What I have seen, and I do see this a lot when I talk to my consulting clients who show me a view into their business and their strategies, is that validation, their validation is often missing a critical and a central step. They look for challenges. They look for proof of pain. That's good, but they do not investigate alternative solutions. They might look for existing soft as a service solutions …