How should a startup lead engineer quickly find market needs and validate ideas?
Hi—I’m a lead engineer at a small startup.
I get ideas from many sources but need practical, fast ways to decide which to prioritize and how to validate them with limited resources.
Please share short, actionable answers on:
1. Idea sources — which channels/methods worked for you?
2. Prioritization criteria — a quick checklist (tech risk, market size, competition).
3. Rapid validation & KPIs — low-cost experiments (landing page, ads, demo) and key metrics.
4. Acquiring early users — realistic channels/approaches for beta/early adopters.
If possible, include a short checklist (≈5 items) or one experiment template. Thanks!
I've been in this industry for decades. In summary these are my criteria:
* If the solution is software only, then there's probably a 100+ comparable solutions out there. See the point below about competition. I prefer problems that involve real people, real money and tangible solutions. YMMV
* First and foremost: Talk to real people who might have the problem you are solving. Emails, forums, etc are a waste of time. If you can't in person contact with 10 people who have the problem you are solving, then how are you going to scale to thousands of millions?
* How big is the pain you are solving? Getting people to part with money causes them existential pain. So your solution needs to transcend that.
* Check out the competition. If there is none, there probably isn't a market either. If you have competitors seek out how you can deliver 10x value compared to them. If you can't, then move on.
* Can you deliver a demonstrable, working MVP within 6 months. If not, then others will probably beat you in that race.
Thank you for clearly organizing the good criteria.
In particular, I strongly agree with the statement that "Talk to real people who might have the problem you are solving". As a solo founder, I usually rely on online communities or analytics metrics when experimenting with SaaS ideas, but as you said, such a method can give false confidence. In the future, I think we should prioritize meeting potential customers directly from the early stages to identify and verify problems.
Also, the perspective of *"without competition, there is no market" is also impressive. I thought that small SaaS tools had no chance because the competition was too fierce, but after listening to them, I think it would be right to filter based on whether I can provide 10 times the value in the competition.
Additional Questions
Any advice would be appreciated:
Meet people – If I don't have a network at all in a particular industry, how do I find and contact the "first 10" people who have real problems? Which approach do you recommend: cold outreach, industry meetups, or leveraging existing communities?
10x value – How do you define and validate "10x value" in a SaaS tool market where there are already many competitors? There are many ways to differentiate features, price, user experience, and focus on specific segments, but I am curious about what early founders should pay special attention to.
Following this comment, I would like to ask the most curious question,
If you were to start a startup from scratch at this point, could you ask what parts or trends you are most paying attention to in the current market? For someone like me who is preparing to start an early business, such a perspective will be very helpful.
Did you use GenAI to write that question? It looks like you want a GenAI answer.
Questions for you:
1. Does the start up have a clear product strategy? If so ideas should come from that.
2. What is the measure of success for the start up - other than £/$/€ - this is how you prioritise
3. What is your actual question? How to do this?
4. Entirely dependant on your product strategy, go to market plans and industry - vague answers won't help you.
1. Does the startup have a clear product strategy?
→ currently has a strategy of "quickly creating multiple SaaS products and seeing the market response." In other words, rather than a single large product, we are moving towards quickly releasing small MVPs and focusing on items that survive. So, strategically, it's more like an "idea experimentation portfolio".
2. What are the criteria for success? (Non-sales indicators)
→ I like to put paid conversion rates, user return rates, and the strength of feedback as the most important metrics.
I think the key success signal is whether there are users who pay money or actively give feedback rather than simply the number of subscribers.
Therefore, we want to define the initial success criteria as "getting the first 50 paying users".
3. What are the key questions you actually want to ask?
→ "What method/framework can a startup lead developer use to efficiently discover market needs and design idea testing experiments at the lowest cost?" In other words, prioritizing ideas → learning with metrics → low-cost validation → wondering how this cycle operates.
4. Does this depend on product strategy/go-to-market/industry?
→ right. I know that too, so to refine my case:
Industry: SaaS (developer tools, creator tools, small team collaboration tools are more of a priority)
Goto Market: Focused on global online communities/markets such as Product Hunt, Reddit, Twitter, and Gumroad
Product strategy: Create small tools quickly and expand them if they → respond, or retire them
In other words, from the perspective of a single founder/small startup,
How to discover needs,
What to experiment with first,
What are the criteria for quickly admitting failure? I would like to know this part specifically.
So to summarize my "real question": "When a solo SaaS founder uses channels like Product Hunt/Developer Community as their main GTM, what is the most practical method/checklist to find market needs and validate ideas?"