The Missing Piece in Your Validation Strategy
Discover overlooked validation methods for founders and learn how to assess alternative solutions beyond traditional SaaS offerings.
Read the essay →From the archive · Page 1 of 2
Validation
Explore validation essays and podcast conversations from Arvid Kahl’s Bootstrapped Founder archive.
The Job To Be Done: Understanding Customer Value Communication
Discover how to communicate your product's value effectively, catering to diverse audiences with unique needs in the podcast industry.
Read the essay →The Age of the Gatekeeper Is Over
The more I work in the world of podcasting, watching the crazy amount of content that people produce, the more convinced I become that we’re living in a time where the age of the gatekeeper — the…
Read the essay →Business Validation Traps
I’ve listened to so many signals I thought would validate my business, but they turned out to actually mislead me or take me in the wrong direction. So, let’s talk about validating a business and…
Read the essay →Avoiding the Entrepreneurial Planning Trap
Let’s talk about planning fallacies for bootstrapped founders. As a founder, especially if you’re starting a business alone, planning is important. But you have to get it right. There are a few…
Read the essay →∀𝑦∃𝑥 ≠ ∃𝑥∀𝑦: The Dangerous Misconception Founders Have About Their Market
(The mathematical notation in the title means “’For all 𝑦 there exists a 𝑥’ is not the same as ‘There exists an 𝑥 for all 𝑦”.) We’re always on the hunt for the silver bullet. The Golden Ticket.…
Read the essay →Negative Reviews are Good for You
I was recently listening to the early episodes of my favorite Star Trek podcast, and the hosts talked about the unfairness of a particularly nasty Apple Podcast review. One star, paired with a snide…
Read the essay →Avoiding the Validation Trap
When founders talk about validation, we often engage in wishful thinking. We say that we want to validate an idea, an audience, or a problem, but in reality, we hope to find a way to be sure. We hope…
Read the essay →Customer Exploration: Seeing Through Your Customer’s Eyes
At this stage of your business, you have a mostly mature product that is used by many customers. You can expect that for most of their use cases, it is good enough. But instead of guessing, I…
Read the essay →The Myth of The Finished Product
Before the internet made transferring large amounts of data cheap and easy, software used to be distributed on CDs or DVDs. For any given application, there was the “Golden Master,” a final version…
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