Tags: [[Article]] [[Marketing]] - [[Entrepreneurship]] [[Validation]]
Author: [[Alex Hillman]] 
From: https://stackingthebricks.com/validation-is-backwards/
 
## Highlights:

On one hand, it’s possible that Lean methods could protect you from making a huge mistake, by making many smaller mistakes instead. You could avoid wasting a whole lot of time and money on a shitty, half-cocked business idea. And hey, that’s not all bad!

Validation claims to be a data-driven process, but the results are neither predictably nor repeatably successful.

“Before you launch, you’ll interview people who may be potential customers, but have not yet given you money, and are ergo not customers. They’ve got no skin in the game, no frame of reference to build on. But even after you launch - and you begin to interview your customers - the technique is flawed.

You rely on your interviewees being experts at research & development — you trust them to identify their own pains with unflinching honesty and accuracy. To remember, in essence, exactly what they do, all day, every day. And to be willing to tell you about it. And to be able to imagine a world unlike the world they inhabit, with a different workflow, different tools, different outlook, different life. You rely on them to accurately identify the causes of the pains they do identify. You rely on them to be wholly rational. They must not care about your feelings at all

You need them to be people who always do exactly what they say they will.”

The process that we created and teach in 30x500 is based on an observational research technique called Ethnography

answers you need for repeatable business success: understanding peoples’ behaviors, specifically why they do (or don’t do) things, and why they buy (or don’t buy) things.