How to validate your product before building
If you can’t get 10 people to commit before you build, you can’t get 100 after. Here’s how to find out fast.
What validation actually means
Validation is not asking people “would you use this?” and getting nods.
Everyone says yes to hypothetical products. It costs them nothing to be polite. Real validation is when someone takes an action that costs them something — time, money, or attention they actually care about.
If 10 people sign up to a waitlist knowing the product doesn’t exist yet, that’s a signal. If 3 people pre-pay, that’s validation.
The bar is higher than you think. And that’s the point.
The fake door test
A fake door test is the fastest validation method I know.
Build a landing page that describes the product as if it exists. Add a “Get started” or “Join waitlist” button. Drive people to it. See how many click and give you their email.
No product needed. No backend. No dashboard. Just a page, a button, and an email form.
I didn’t do this with MagicSell. I built the product first and created the landing page after. By then I’d already spent months. The fake door would have told me the same thing in a week.
Landing page + waitlist
Your landing page needs three things:
- What it is (one sentence)
- Who it’s for (one sentence)
- What they should do next (email sign-up)
No feature lists. No pricing. No roadmap. Those come later.
Drive traffic to it before you build. Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit, wherever your potential users are. The conversion rate tells you more than any survey.
How to talk to potential customers
A DM or email asking “would you use X?” is useless. Everyone says yes.
The format that actually works: “I’m building X for [their type of business]. Can I show you what I’m thinking and get 20 minutes of feedback?”
Then on the call: don’t pitch. Ask questions. How do they solve this problem today? What does it cost them in time or money? What have they already tried?
If they describe the problem you’re solving without you prompting them, you’ve found something real.
My MagicSell pre-launch story
I didn’t validate before building. I knew upselling was a problem in e-commerce — I’d read the stats, I understood the space. I thought that was enough.
It wasn’t.
I built for months before talking to a Shopify store owner in a way where I was genuinely trying to get them to pay for something. When I finally did, the feedback was useful but expensive — I’d already built features they didn’t care about and missed things they actually wanted.
Validation would have saved me 2 months of building in the wrong direction.
The takeaway
Don’t ask “would you use this?” Ask people to take an action. Fake door test, landing page, pre-payment — any of these beats months of building in the dark. Do it in week one.
Building something? Follow me on Instagram and Twitter — I document everything.