How To Know You Have a Successful Product Before You Build It

Five ways to validate your product idea without resorting to a fake website

Let’s clear up a big misconception about visionaries and their killer product ideas.

Entrepreneurs and CEOs have vision, sure, but it’s not the kind of vision that sees into the future and gets an exclusive sneak preview of the next big thing.

Those ideas need validation.

There’s an old saying about how overnight successes usually take years. On the flip side, every bet that is made on the sheer gut instinct of a product idea is just that — a bet. History only remembers the winners, and we remember them as overnight successes. The failed product ideas — of which there are exponentially more — never get a second thought. That’s why it’s a “dustbin” of history.

Every good entrepreneur is a bit of a maverick. Every good CEO is a bit of a gambler. But there are several ways to figure out if you’re trying to invent the next big product thing or just churning out a future pile of ashes for the historical heap.

Validate the product, not the trend or the market

An entrepreneur came to my website with this question — Is it a good idea to…