Why not check your passion and interest regardless of presence/lack of competition and then you can play a long game instead of being in a reactive state.
This one strikes straight to the heart. We pivoted post YC batch to what was hot at the time and saw a lot of competition (some raising millions more than us). We thought this market validation. Five years later, almost every single company on that list has either died or pivoted.
I mean, markets and industries change as well. Companies that have product market fit today can find themselves having to pivot as the sands shift under them.
My views on market validation have changed with age. What I've observed after talking to hundreds of founders is that it's now so easy for someone to enter a market that it seems like those that are successful are the ones who managed to _create_ their market. No matter how smart or how good your idea is, many many successful ventures are successful because of some intangible / hard-to-reproduce circumstance that allowed them to create the market. It could be investor /pr momentum, connections, regulatory friction or some other intangible, but whatever it is - it's not something that could be easily reproduced because it's nuanced for every founder and company.
Yes, totally true. This is dangerous though when those circumstances change and basically invalidate the whole category.
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
I've been building startups for 15 years now and through a lot of pain, reflection and study have learned:
- 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
not an expert by any means but just my 2 cents, if a guy is willing to enter their cc and pay for your product, there is no bigger validation than that. everything else feels like smoke and mirrors to me
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 44.5 ms ] threadYea.. maybe change your focus?
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
If your competitors have customers, I think that is a sign of market validation. If they do not, then you might not either.
- 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
Lots of companies successfully raising funds isn't market validation, but who ever said it was?