validate before building

welcome to introspection ft. harsehaj! ⭐️ i’m harsehaj, a 19 y/o always up to something in social good x tech.

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onto today’s topic: validate before building 🔎 

you can’t build a good product based off assumption alone. even if you have hundreds of websites and papers cited as sources, that’s still not enough.

your green light to build should be validation from real people in your target audience that you’ve talked to personally. you’ll never understand a problem scope unless you listen to those experiencing it.

this is a common mistake and trap that many builders, including myself, fall into. 🥅 our instinct is to immediately start writing code and shipping once an idea comes to mind; however, one step is missing: validating that there’s actually a need and market for this idea.

there’s no point building something that nobody needs.

let’s say you’re trying to improve the training for fast food employees and whip up an ai-assisted training app. realistically, what fast food employee is going to take the time to upload their different regulations and download the app when they’re being paid minimum wage? 🤨 

think critically, and always ask questions:

• how does this solution fit into the user experience?

• how badly is fast food management actually impacted by this problem?

• what does the current training process look like?

the solution sounds good on paper, but most ideas fail when it comes to adoption and distribution. in order to avoid that, you must choose an appropriate target audience and business model, and that only comes if you validate your idea in the first place.

building things out is the easy step — ai can write most of our code now. the experimentation and validation process of analyzing what works and what doesn’t is the tricky part.

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