Stop Building in the Dark: Validate and Launch with an AI Cofounder by Your Side

The Dilemma of Great Ideas

We all know that it's itchy when a great idea strikes you. The "eureka" moment excites us and makes us jump into building. I'm one of those people who has a hard time falling asleep while there is an idea spinning in their head. Another very familiar feeling is disappointment after the product is out, and all dashboards show flat lines. Sounds familiar? That's how at least 9 out of 10 ideas end up.

What happened? You put energy, time, and passion into building something that nobody needs or knows they need.

The Path to Value

It doesn't need to be this way! Your idea isn't inherently bad, but it requires proper shaping and packaging to become something valuable for your target users and customers.

The Missing Link: Real-World Feedback

So, what is the missing link between your idea and getting a successful product? It's the real-world feedback that evolves the idea into a valuable product. Many founders rely entirely on their intuition and proceed to build right away. Intuition is a great weapon, but it's the spark that should ignite the process of validating your idea.

Building Confidence Through Insights

Founders often think that experiencing a customer problem themselves is a strong enough signal to build a product. Such anecdotal evidence is a great start, but shouldn’t be the final destination. To have high confidence in your idea, you need to aggregate insights and validation from many people who represent your customer segment in order to build the complete picture of your target market. Otherwise, it's like trying to shoot through a keyhole. Another reason for building prematurely is great principles that are misunderstood, like “Fail Fast” and “Ship it and they will come”. “Fail Fast” has never been about building a product that nobody wants. It’s about taking the shortest path to addressing the riskiest part of your idea at every stage. Building the product is rarely the riskiest part - the world is full of products that were successfully built and then failed. The riskiest part is finding the product-market fit, which comes with market validation.

The Challenge of Validation

Some founders realize the importance of validating their idea, but don't know how to approach it and mix problem validation interviews with sales calls, ending up with neither validation nor a sale. A proper idea validation process is meant to provide deep insights into the following:

• What is the customer segment
• What customer pain and needs they have, and how they fulfill them today
• What is the impact of not having an optimal solution to their needs
• How do they look for a solution to their problem, and what are the criteria they use to make a buying decision

This is done through customer interviews that explore the past experience of the target audience. Conducting a customer interview can both feel intimidating and overly easy. The questions we ask and the way we ask them can significantly influence the answers that we receive, leading to false positive and false negative signals.

Common Pitfalls in Interviewing

We often see questions on public forums like: "What features would make you use ?" "What do you think about? Is it worth building?" "How much are you willing to pay for solving ?" These questions, while very well-intended, ask for opinions. In reality, the views of people (especially buyers) significantly deviate from their actual behavior, leading to situations like "I got raving responses and hundreds of upvotes on Reddit, but now nobody subscribes to my product."

Best Practices for Effective Interviews

To avoid that, customer interviews should be based on the best practices for customer research, exploring previous and current behavior instead of asking for future and hypothetical actions. Instead of asking, "Will you buy?" ask, "Have you acquired in the past ..." This way, you give interviewees the opportunity to tell their authentic stories and base your plan on these insights.

Analyzing Conversation Feedback

After conducting customer interviews, it's time to analyze them and draw conclusions. People are social creatures and usually enjoy interacting with others. Our assessment of how a conversation went is heavily influenced by how we felt during the conversation:

• Was the other person nice
• Did they tell me what I expected/needed to hear
• Where they are approachable and easy to communicate with

These are natural biases, but cannot be used as a reliable signal for idea validation. It's common to fall victim to confirmation bias - hearing only things that we want or expect ot hear. Conducting reliable analyses of tens and even hundreds of conversations is a tedious job, and it's even harder to remain objective and unbiased.

The Role of an AI Cofounder

Even though people try to use LLMs for everything, they are great in some specific areas:

• content generation when provided with enough context
• analyzing and summarizing content when provided with instructions and directions

This is precisely where current AI technologies can make a massive difference for the startup founders:

• AI cofounders can create an interview script according to the industry's best practices that asks the right questions for the phase in which your product is. You can receive a script to follow during your conversations that is adapted to your idea and sounds natural.

• AI is excellent at listening and documenting your conversations. Many people rely on their notes to capture a conversation, but all notes are projections of our brain machine for what is essential and what is not while at the same time trying to lead a conversation. The AI can capture every word and leave the interpretation for later.
• AI can analyze and extract insights and summaries of all your conversations in a matter of minutes. The insights are based on actual things people said and not on your impression of how the conversation went. The analysis is always up to date and improves with every conversation that you add.

• AI can be next to you during each conversation or even lead it instead of you following the predefined script, but also deep dive with follow-up questions where there is potential for uncovering a hidden gem.

Based on that information, you can get to your first customers by creating a go-to-market strategy that is informed by how your target audience shops for a solution like yours. Moreover, you are empowered to build a product that is actually needed by them and addresses pain points that go unnoticed by competitors. Founders often struggle with figuring out their unfair advantage or unique selling point. There is no secret recipe for getting to those, but they most often come from a deep understanding of your customer segment and their needs, and addressing them in a way that others cannot. That's your insurance and rocket booster for rapid growth. Icanpreneur is a platform that creates a space to interact with your AI cofounder, who:

• deeply understands your business
• is always available for you and ready with the next steps in front of you
• Prepares, documents, and analyzes a pile of interviews, capturing the most critical insights that you need to know to move forward

Launching products doesn't need to be shot in the dark. Creating successful products takes months and years of work. Why wouldn't we give ourselves the best chances to get to the full potential of our ideas? Icanpreneur is a platform that acts as an AI cofounder and is next to you at any step of validating your idea, from capturing the idea in the form of a business model, through preparing for customer interviews and documenting them, to finally analyzing and capturing insights at scale. This is your advisor who knows everything about your idea and is ready to help you at the next step on your entrepreneurial journey. We have prepared a special offer for readers of Uneed it, and the first 20 subscribers can start their entrepreneurial journey with Icanpreneur at 30% off the subscription price for the first 12 months using the coupon code UNEED30OFF. Start now at icanpreneur.com.