Getting a business idea is easy and failing to execute it is also easy. What is most difficult part for startup owners is picking the right idea and executing it well. So, why don't you come up with 3-4 ideas and get it validated to narrow down which idea is best one for you to go ahead.....Idea Validation will give you the most successful idea to pursue.

1. STARTUP
IDEAS
VALIDATION

2. Every startup
begins with an idea

3. Professionals need an online
presence and social network

4. This is an
articulation about
coming up with
ideas

5. And picking
a good one
through validation

10. 1. Inspiration
2. Knowledge
3. Environment
4. Problem
5. Market
6. MVP
Outline

11. Where do ideas
come from?

12. Is it from a
flash of insight?

13. Thomas Edison and a light bulb

14. Isaac Newton and an apple

15. Archimedes and “Eureka!”

16. Actually, most historians believe
the “Eureka!” story is made up.

17. An apple did not hit Newton. He
studied gravity for 20 years.

18. Edison didn’t invent the light bulb,
but an affordable filament.

19. After testing thousands
of materials.

20. “I have not failed. I've
just found 10,000 ways
that won't work.”
– Thomas Edison

21. Ideas are not just flashes of
insight. They grow and evolve.

22. WHICH MEANS FIRST YOU NEED TO
SOW SEEDS

23. The seeds of ideas are
knowledge

24. What do the following
songs have in common?

29. They are all based on the
exact same 4 chords

30. And so are dozens of
other hit songs

31. Axis of Awesome
4 Chord Song

32. Top 100 movies, 2000 - 2009

33. 74 of them were sequels,
remakes, or adaptations

35. The sequel to a movie based on a
cartoon based on a US toy based on
Japanese toy.

36. Microsoft Windows (~1990)

37. Apple Mac OS (~1984)

38. Xerox Alto (~1973)

39. Stanford NLS (~1968)

41. Knowledge

42. Ideas

43. Ideas are connections between
the knowledge in your mind

44. The more you know, the more
connections are possible

45. To form connects, you need
the right environment

46. Throughout history, we
often see multiple
instances of discovery

47. Calculus: Isaac Newton and
Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz

48. Evolution: Charles Darwin and
Alfred Russel Wallace

49. Telephone: Elisha Gray and
Alexander Graham Bell

50. “I invented nothing new. I
simply assembled the
discoveries of other men
behind whom were centuries
of work. Had I worked 50 or
10 or even 5 years before, I
would have failed. So it is
with every new thing.

51. Progress happens when all
the factors that make for it
are ready, and then it is
inevitable. To teach that a
comparatively few men are
responsible for the greatest
forward steps of mankind is
the worst sort of nonsense.”
– Henry Ford

52. The environment plays a huge role in
coming up with ideas

53. The key ingredients:
1. Keep an idea journal
2. Get away from work
3. Add constraints
4. Live in the future
5. Look for pain
6. Talk to others

54. Not a diary, but a way to log ideas whenever
you have them.

55. No filters. Don’t judge your ideas. Just write
them down.

56. Write down not only ideas, but also problems
and questions.

57. A UC Davis study by
Dean Kean Simonton
found eminent
achievers produce not
only more “great”
works, but also more
“bad” ones.

58. “The best way to have a
good idea is to have a lot
of ideas.”
– Linus Pauling

59. Review periodically. This is how ideas grow
and evolve.

60. First, work intensely to load the problem into
your mind.

61. Then get away from work.

62. Einstein had his best ideas during violin
breaks.

63. Some people get ideas in the shower. I get
mine on walks.

64. Try this exercise from Made to
Stick:

65. In 15 seconds, write down as many
things that are white as you can think
of.

66. Do the exercise again, but this time,
write down white things in your
refrigerator.

67. Which was easier?

68. Constraints breed creativity

69. Someone once challenged Ernest
Hemmingway to write a story in just
6 words. The result:

70. For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

71. If no ideas are coming to mind, try
narrowing the problem space

72. “Live in the future, then
build what’s missing.”
– Paul Graham

73. But how exactly do you
live in the future?

74. At Xerox PARC, they used to
play the Wayne Gretzky Game

75. “Skate to where the puck
is going to be, not where
it has been.”
– Wayne Gretzky

77. Where
there is
pain, there
is
opportunity

78. “This is stupid,
there must be a
better way”
– Mahmoud
Al-Qudsi

79. “Is this how the world should be?” –
Reid Hoffman

80. Don’t keep your ideas secret.

81. If someone could beat you just by
hearing your idea, it wasn’t a
defensible idea to begin with.

82. Two minds are greater than one

83. Just explaining your ideas out
loud will reveal new ideas

84. Even if the other person isn’t an
expert in that domain

85. Even if the other person isn’t a
person (rubber duck debugging)

86. “The surprising fact is
that companies large
and small, established
corporate giants as well
as brand new startups,
fail in 9 out of 10
attempts to launch
their new products.”

87. CB insights looked at the post-
mortems of 100+ failed startups

88. The #1 cause of failure:
“no market need”

89. Don’t spend years working on the
wrong problem

90. It’s easy to find something that sounds
like a problem, but it isn’t.

91. Consider the dental industry

92. Problems to solve:
Healthy teeth, healthy gums

94. Problems to solve: strong teeth,
fresh breath

96. Wrong problem means wrong
products, marketing, sales

97. “People don't want to
buy a quarter-inch
drill. They want a
quarter-inch hole!”
– Theodore Levitt

98. How to validate you’re solving the
right problem:
1. Ask who will buy it?
2. Ask the 5 whys
3. Ask why now?
4. Ask why you?

99. Find a customer before you build
the product

100. Don’t build anything until they
commit to buying it.

101. Who would buy a non-existent
product? An earlyvangelist.

102. Earlyvangelist:
1. They have a problem.
2. They’re aware of the problem.
3. They built an interim solution.
4. They have money to spend.

103. To find these customers, you’ll
have to get out of the building

104. If you ask people what coffee they like,
most would say,
“a dark, rich, hearty roast.”

105. But what most people actually like is
milky, weak coffee.

106. “If I had asked
people what they
wanted, they
would have said
faster horses.” –
Henry Ford

107. You have to dig to find the
real problems and solutions.

108. Try out the 5 Whys Technique:

109. “The truck won’t start.”

110. “The battery died.”
“Why?”

111. “The alternator
wasn’t working.”
“Why?”

112. “The alternator
belt broke.”
“Why?”

113. “The belt wasn’t
replaced on time.”
“Why?”

114. “We didn’t follow the
maintenance schedule.”
“Why?”

115. The famous question from
Sequoia Capital: Why now?

116. Why not 2 years ago? 2 years
from now? What changed?

117. Example: Webvan vs Instacart.

118. You found a real problem. Should you
be the one to solve it?

120. Don’t ignore aspirations

121. It takes, on average, 10 years to
build a successful startup

122. Are you willing to dedicate a
decade of your life to this?

123. If you’re willing, the next step is to
evaluate the market

124. How many customers do you need to be
successful?

125. For example, if you want to do $1B in
revenue some day:

126. Sell product at:
$1 to 1 billion: Coca-Cola (cans of soda)
$10 to 100 million: Johnson & Johnson (household
products)
$100 to 10 million: Blizzard (World of Warcraft)
$1,000 to 1 million: Lenovo (laptops)
$10,000 to 100,000: Toyota (cars)
$100,000 to 10,000: Oracle (enterprise software)
$1,000,000 to 1,000: Countrywide (high-end mortgages)

127. rket sizing techniques:
Research competitors
Use ad-targeting tools
Find a community
Do some good-old research

128. Competitors are a form of validation
too.

129. Tools to research competitors:
1. Web analytics
Quantcast, Moz, Comscore, Alexa, SimilarWeb
2. Mobile analytics
App Annie, Apptopia, Xyo, Apptweak
3. Social analytics
Fanpage Karma, SpyFu, Google Trends, Twitonomy
4. Funding
CrunchBase, AngelList, Owler, Kickstarter

130. Use ad-targeting tools to
explore market demographics

131. Ad-targeting tools:
1. Google Keyword Planner
2. Facebook Ads
3. LinkedIn Ads
4. Twitter Ads

132. There may already be a
community for your product

133. Community tools:
1. Meetup.com
2. Lanyrd
3. Subreddits
4. Quora topics
5. LinkedIn Groups

134. Research tools:
1. Newspapers, books, journals
2. Government reports, SEC filings
3. Google
4. Google Trends
5. World Bank Data
6. AYTM Surveys
7. Nielson Research

135. If the market is big enough, the next
validation step is the MVP

136. A Minimum Viable Product is not a
product. It’s a process.

137. “You know that old
saw about a plane
flying from
California to
Hawaii being off
course 99% of the
time—but
constantly
correcting?

138. The same is true
of successful
startups—except
they may start out
heading toward
Alaska.”
– Evan Williams

139. Naive view of product
development

140. Amore realistic view of
product development

141. In a trial-and-error world, the one
who finds errors fastest, wins.

142. The MVP process is repeatedly ask
yourself two questions:

143. 1. What’s my riskiest assumption?
2. What’s the smallest
experiment to test it?

144. The smallest experiment doesn’t
have to be a product.

145. Landing
page
MVP
(Buffer)

146. Explainer video MVP (Dropbox)

147. Crowd-funding MVP (Pebble)

148. Wizard of Oz MVP (Zappos)

149. Piecemeal MVP (groupbox)

150. The smallest experiment does
have to be viable

151. How to build an MVP

152. Let’s go through an example

159. India’s #1 Research & Ranking
Company for Startups - Ideovate.io