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- Prove It First. How Founders Validated Before Building.
Prove It First. How Founders Validated Before Building.
Inside the scrappy, smart tactics that got early customers saying “yes.”
The Startup Leap
June 08, 2025
Hey Startup Leapers 👋
This week, we’re digging into something every founder wrestles with - whether they admit it or not: validation.
We’ve seen it time and time again - founders spending months, sometimes years, tweaking a product based on what they think people want.
But here’s the hard truth: if you haven’t talked to at least 10 potential customers this month, you’re probably validating in a vacuum.
Validation isn't a survey. It's a conversation.
It’s the moment when someone’s eyes light up and they say, “Oh, I’d pay for that.”
🎧 Victor Alade (Raenest) - Pre-Sold with a Google Doc + NDA
Victor, founder of Raenest, knew his hunch about remote payments wasn’t enough. So he went out and spoke to freelancers.
Not one or two - hundreds. He wanted to understand how they were actually getting paid and the real-life headaches they faced.
He started scrappy. A Google Doc, shared under NDA, became his MVP.
His early testers weren’t engineers or developers (which was his background); they were translators, writers, and VAs from platforms like Upwork.
And their feedback was gold.
Impact? Victor validated that over $5m per month was flowing through Upwork freelancers in Nigeria alone - and most of them faced delays, trust issues, and high fees.
Takeaway: Ask users to describe their process, then build a mockup with them, not for them.
Use tools like Google Docs or Notion to co-create in real time.
🎧 Michelle Kennedy - Found Product-Market Fit by Listening, Not Pitching
Michelle left behind a big corporate career to build Peanut. But her earliest insight came not from data, but conversations.
She spoke to mums, not about features, but about feelings.
Women didn’t say, “We need a new app.” They said, “Motherhood is isolating.”
Michelle used those stories to shape Peanut as a social graph, not a parenting utility.
Her beta was lean: an app with simple matching features and no community tab.
Now - Peanut is now a global community with millions of users and high engagement.
So the takeaway? Have 1:1 chats and listen for emotional keywords. Use Airtable or Typeform to group feedback.
🎧 Nadia Odunayo - Bootstrapped Growth with a Companion App Prototype
Nadia didn’t set out to rival Goodreads. She built a tiny tool to fix one thing Goodreads lacked: custom book lists.
The original version of StoryGraph was a companion app.
No fancy UI. Just a working feature that pulled shelves from Goodreads and let you create visual progress lists.
She quietly launched to a niche community of book lovers and tracked what they did.
Impact? StoryGraph is now a full-fledged Goodreads alternative with millions of users - all without raising VC.
We hope these inspire you as much as they did us.
Here’s 5 fresh validation ideas that you can try this week 🌟
Book 5 user interviews with zero pitching. Just ask about their pain points.
Post a rough Figma/Notion mockup on LinkedIn - gauge reactions.
Manually onboard 3 test users (think: concierge MVP).
Launch a waitlist with a real ask (email + pre-payment if relevant).
Rewrite your landing page headline based on exact user quotes.
Until Next Time!
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