1. Make some sales

Making a few sales is the first and arguably best way to validate your product. There is nothing more important than customers seeing your product’s value and exchanging money for it.

Until people pay you, your business is nothing more than a collection of assumptions. Getting to know potential customers is important, but you can’t build your business until people pay you.

Nimi Kular, co-founder of Jaswant’s Kitchen, has particular experience in validating product ideas for her family business that sells Indian seasonings and cooking kits. She says, “Market evaluation, surveys, and feedback from friends and family can point you in the right direction, but money is the only thing that can validate a product.”

Kular would attend small shows and sell the earliest versions of their product. “For us, that happened at the first few shows we went to, where complete strangers bought our product. That’s when we knew we were fulfilling a genuine need with a product people would pay for.”