Validate overview
Validate overview
Section titled “Validate overview”Research tells you what the market looks like from a distance. Validation gets you closer — it puts your riskiest assumptions in front of real potential users and records what they actually do and say. This is the stage where ideas get confirmed, corrected, or killed cheaply, before the expensive part (building) starts.
The Validate stage lives in each idea’s Validate section and offers five tools. Each answers a different kind of question.
The five tools
Section titled “The five tools”Surveys
Section titled “Surveys”AI-generated questionnaires delivered to real respondents. Best for asking a question at scale: how much would you pay, how essential is this, how likely would you be to recommend it? Responses flow back into your PMF score automatically. → Learn about surveys
Audience panels
Section titled “Audience panels”Your own contact lists of potential customers, built by hand or imported from a CSV, organized by tags. Panels are the delivery network for surveys — who you send your questions to. → Learn about audience panels
Customer discovery
Section titled “Customer discovery”Structured interviews with real people in your target market: AI-generated interview scripts, session notes, insights, themes, and a jobs-to-be-done map. Best for deep qualitative understanding — the why behind the problem. → Learn about customer discovery
Fake-door tests
Section titled “Fake-door tests”A landing page that looks like a real product offer — with real buttons, including a real payment button — that measures behavior: who clicks, who leaves an email, who actually pays. The most honest demand signal you can get before building. → Learn about fake-door tests
Landing pages
Section titled “Landing pages”A page builder with templates, AI copywriting, and AI-generated background images. Use it to create the assets a fake-door test needs — or a real page when you’re ready to launch. → Learn about the landing page builder
Which tool when?
Section titled “Which tool when?”| Your question | Use |
|---|---|
| “Do people say they’d pay?” | Survey — ask directly, get numbers |
| “Who exactly should I be talking to?” | Audience panel — build and segment the list |
| “Why does this problem hurt? What’s the job?” | Customer discovery — interview and map |
| “Would people actually click and pay?” | Fake-door test — measure real behavior |
| “I need a page to run the test / show the product” | Landing page builder |
How validation fits the pipeline
Section titled “How validation fits the pipeline”Validation closes the loop with the other stages:
- Score → Validate. When your PMF score or research suggests a weak spot (say, low willingness to pay), run the tool that tests that exact assumption.
- Validate → Score. Survey answers feed back into your PMF score through the automatic bridge, replacing guesswork with respondent data.
- Validate → Decide. Evidence from validation — especially fake-door payment data — is the strongest input to the go/no-go decision.
Before you start
Section titled “Before you start”You’ll get the most from validation if your idea has at least a little research behind it — a target audience to interview and a value proposition to test. If you’re starting cold, run a few research phases first so your questions and pages speak to a real audience.
Ready to get evidence? Start with surveys or customer discovery.