- markets are patterns in what people are trying to get done (importance / satisfaction)
- having an objective to validate a market is foolish for startup founders, maybe it makes sense as DD for vcs but they never do it, which is also foolish (founders should be trying to discover and understand markets, not validate them)
- getting good at quickly discovering and seeing truth in markets is a skill that can be developed, and is extremely valuable for engineers to learn
- opportunities are all about timing, and requires knowing about lots of markets and lots of tech and seeing how they can come together
- the timing is all about knowing how good tech needs to be to be better at getting customer job done, which requires understanding tech and empathy for customers (or luck)
- pmfit failure rate is so high because most founders don't even know what a market is
I can think of NFT infrastructure here:
Various product categories were created with market leaders that owned them.
But the NFT hype didn’t hold and we effectively realized the use cases didn’t manifest beyond ZIRP-driven speculation and a small collector-artist scene.
So that can negate the whole category or crown a different winner when a technology changes.
Imagine if we used NFTs to verify if an AI or human made a piece of media.
Suddenly “marketplace” becomes a much less interesting category than scalable, fast APIs to create NFTs
Yea.. maybe change your focus?
Get in loser, we're going for a monopoly! It's all fun and games until you're locked in and enshitification sets in. I would sooner go without than get fooled again.
If your competitors have customers, I think that is a sign of market validation. If they do not, then you might not either.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/kzoh1c/i_am...
This article is assume startup - you raise a lot of money and get a lot of people to help you build the product fast to get to the very large market. A valid strategy and can earn you a lot of money if there is a large market you can serve.
However there are a lot of markets that are not that big. If your passion is something Pet Rocks - that will probably be a tiny market (it was once big for a short time, but the time is over and unlikely to come back - thought maybe I'm wrong). You are unlikely to every grow a large business because there are so few other people interested in your passion.
There are other markets where your interest/passion will make one person a nice income, but can never scale to a large company. The investors this article is concerned about want nothing to do with it: they can never make their investment back. However you as a person can make a lot of money in this niche self funding the company and growing no faster. It will be hard work, and it will only get you into the lower end of the upper middle class, never rich - but that can be a nice life.
Or you can discover the hard way there is only so much you can take of your interest before you burn out.
Lots of companies successfully raising funds isn't market validation, but who ever said it was?
This is tautological as there is no other way of reading customer demand than the market. Otherwise, I suspect, the vast majority of customer demand would not be available to purchase at all.
