Do I Have a Good Idea for a Startup?
- Stephanie Roulic
- Sep 18
- 37 min read
Every founder has that spark—the “what if” moment that makes them wonder if their idea could be the next big thing. But before you dive into building, hiring, and raising capital, it’s worth asking the tough question: is there really a market for this?
At Startup Boston, we teamed up with the City of Boston to help first-time founders and aspiring entrepreneurs do just that. In this session, we learned from:
Jessica Angeles - Community Manager @ MassChallenge
Sid Desai - Co-Founder & CEO @ Novobeing
Jill Kravetz - Bruce and Bridgitt Evans Executive Director @ Harvard Innovation Labs
Igor Belagorudsky - President, FastCTO
They unpacked how to evaluate whether your startup idea is worth pursuing—and how to start laying the groundwork for product-market fit.
From cutting through biased feedback to tailoring your validation strategy by industry, the panel shared real-world lessons and practical tips to help you avoid common missteps and focus on what really matters: solving problems that people care about.
5 Takeaways for Validating Startup Ideas
1. Differentiating Startup Ideas from Business Ideas
The panel emphasized the importance of understanding the distinction between a promising startup idea and a viable business. Personal experiences and practical advice highlighted how founders can validate their ideas and avoid common pitfalls like false positives in product-market fit.
2. Avoiding Bias in Feedback
A critical takeaway was the "mom test," which warns against relying on family and friends for honest feedback. The discussion reinforced the necessity of gathering objective insights, either through customer interviews or modern tools like AI, while cautiously managing the inherent biases in AI-generated feedback.
3. Tailoring Validation Strategies to Market Type
Panelists provided valuable insights on how validation strategies differ across regulated industries like healthcare versus consumer products. Understanding end-user needs, mapping workflow, and pinpointing key leverage points were crucial elements for navigating complex decision-making processes in regulated markets.
4. Prioritizing Customer Needs and Value
Founders were encouraged to focus on what they could save or make for users. Key advice included understanding user pain points, observing behaviors to uncover latent needs, and ensuring the value proposition resonates with real-world challenges faced by the target audience.
5. Navigating Pivots and Failures
The speakers shared their perspectives on when to pivot or abandon a startup idea. They distinguished between "soft pivots," which adjust features or target demographics, and "hard pivots," which often signal a major shift in direction. Real-world examples, like Slack's transformation from a gaming company to a communication tool, illustrated how pivots can lead to breakthroughs.
Full Transcript Below
Want to revisit a particular quote or share with a teammate? We’ve got you covered. Read the transcript here:
Jessica Angeles
[ 00:00:00 ]Stephanie, I am super excited to have this amazing panel together. Just a little bit of background. Hi, I'm Jessica. I'm Community Manager at MassChallenge. A lot of my work is supporting a lot of the innovators that are working to solve massive challenges. We're headquartered here in Massachusetts. And a lot of my work, I'm supporting founders and getting them connected with mentors, experts, corporations, and other communities such as Startup Boston. So again, remember to buy your ticket for next week.
Jessica Angeles
[ 00:00:28 ] And just continue to see them flourish and grow throughout their journeys. So I will stop talking and I will provide the opportunity for our speakers to introduce themselves. If they can give a brief introduction on their background and how it connects to today's topic. Jill, why don't you kick us off?
Jill Kravetz
[ 00:00:47 ] Sure. Yeah. So I'll start with the end. So I am currently the new executive director of the Harvard Innovation Labs. Harvard Innovation Labs is the kind of central hub for entrepreneurship at Harvard. So we service all 13 Harvard schools and we help founders with all kinds of resources and connections. And everything to help them get their ideas off the ground. My background spans strategy consulting from a long time ago with big, huge companies, solving lots of different problems for them, to starting two companies, to doing a little bit of venture capital, to running companies for founders. So I've had lots of experience kind of figuring out how to launch new ideas, failing, succeeding, and learning all the way through.
Jessica Angeles
[ 00:01:32 ] Igor, do you want to jump in and then we can go?
Igor Belagorudsky
[ 00:01:35 ] Yeah, that's fine. Hi, everyone. My name's Igor. I love startups. I've had a bunch of startups, a couple exits, even more failures across a couple of different industries. I run this thing called Fast CTO. We're kind of like a nonprofit CTO consultancy to help your startup do the right stuff. I'll throw my LinkedIn in the chat as well. Happy to chat with anyone afterwards.
Sid Desai
[ 00:02:02 ] And hey everyone, my name is Sid Desai. I'm here in Boston, Massachusetts. I'm also a founder of an immersive digital health startup. We've developed a virtual reality platform that helps reduce stress, anxiety, depression for hospitalized patients. So if any one of you here is wanting to find any kind of product market fit in one of the hardest markets out there, healthcare, I'll be your guy to shed some light into. So yeah, happy to share any insights on what I've learned navigating a tough, challenging healthcare environment with a digital health product.
Jessica Angeles
[ 00:02:36 ] Thank you all. And as you can see, we're getting a range of experiences. So this is going to be a very interesting panel. So really excited to get some advice. I know it's only about nine in the morning, so we're still kind of waking up. But I have to ask the big question that we're all curious about. How do you differentiate between a good startup idea versus a good business idea?
Sid Desai
[ 00:03:06 ] Sure. I think I can kind of get started here and I'd love to hear thoughts from Jill and Igor as well. So I think, for me personally, you know, been in the healthcare space like for a while now, I think what I've learned is a really good startup idea.
Sid Desai
[ 00:03:22 ] Typically, it's something that excites you. And I think a really good business idea is something that excites other people and not just excites them, but also excites them enough that they'll actually pay money for it. I think that's the most important, you know, differentiation. And I've learned my lessons the hard way. I think most early stage startup founders get excited about the idea and it's all about them and their ideas. And the reality is, you know, you have to really think about, how does the actual business behind the idea work? And are there people out there willing to not only pay for that problem, but also pay for that problem like today? Because if you can't get that money today, then that's not an idea that they're... or a solution I guess they're looking to solve today. So that would be my kind of, you know, differentiation between a good startup idea versus a good business idea.
Jill Kravetz
[ 00:04:15 ] I'll jump in too. And actually, it's interesting. I've never thought of it that way, Sid. So I really appreciate your answer about it's something that makes sense to you as the founder versus other people. And I think, you know, from my perspective, a good startup idea is one where there's really clear white space in the market. So there's a really clear gap and you're solving a very big problem. And that problem, if you solve that problem, you have a very compelling standalone business that, A, people will pay for, like Sid said, that you can get some, you know. backing behind in terms of investors or if you're self-funding it, that you're going to see a return on that. A really good business idea could, I mean, I'm taking this very literally, but it could be anything, right? So it could be. You know, I have an ongoing business and I want to start up. I want to open a flagship retail store to showcase everything. That flagship retail store might be a great idea because it helps build the profile of the business. But as a standalone business, it's not probably not going to make money.
Jill Kravetz
[ 00:05:17 ] So it's just kind of thinking about. this idea as something that you can really use to solve a big problem. And the problem has to matter to someone other than your mom.
Igor Belagorudsky
[ 00:05:30 ] Yeah, I'll echo that. I actually disagree a little bit with Jill about clear white space. I think there's... The world is big enough that if there is something out there that does something similar, that just proves that there is a need for it. That's why there is an Uber and a Lyft. That's why there is a Netflix and a Hulu. Right. Like, it's OK if there's somebody out there doing something similar. But as Sid and Jill said, you gotta figure out how we'll make money. And coming from a technical perspective, right? I've gotten caught in this trap a lot of times where I'll literally wake up with an idea and my instinct is, 'Let's go build it because I can,'
Sid Desai
[ 00:06:12 ] right?
Igor Belagorudsky
[ 00:06:13 ] And then I'll waste a bunch of time. And then it's a terrible business idea because they can't, nobody wants it except me.
Jessica Angeles
[ 00:06:22 ] And that's a good segue. And since I already have you chatting, Igor, I'm definitely curious to hear what is your go-to approach that you'd recommend to an early stage founder on validating if a problem is real, urgent, and worth solving for, especially since some solutions already exist before they're building anything.
Igor Belagorudsky
[ 00:06:41 ] Great. I'm seeing a lot of people talk about moms. That is the worst idea. Anybody in your family, especially people who love you, will not tell you how bad your idea is.
Igor Belagorudsky
[ 00:06:55 ] So ask your mom last.
Igor Belagorudsky
[ 00:06:59 ] Or don't even ask your mom. Inform your mom that you're doing this.
Igor Belagorudsky
[ 00:07:04 ] So, yeah.
Igor Belagorudsky
[ 00:07:07 ] These days, it's actually, it's a little bit different, right? My answer to this question would have been different three or four years ago than it is now. Three or four years ago, the answer is. customer interviews, go out there, go to an event like Stephanie mentioned, like the start of Boston Week, just network, start talking to people and say, I'm thinking of building this. What do you think? You can go to a nice networking event and immediately get, not immediately, over the course of two hours, get. 20 to 30 people weighing in on your idea, people that have some experience bringing ideas to market. So it gives you some confidence of whether it's a good idea or not. These days, that is still a very good approach, but these days, surprisingly, I've actually gotten some interesting validation from AI. Now, with AI, you have to be a little bit careful because AI tends to be very supportive, kind of like your mom.
Igor Belagorudsky
[ 00:08:07 ] So you have to kind of tell ChatGPT or Cloud or whatever you're doing or whatever you're using. be very critical. you know, be super critical and say, here's what I'm thinking of building. Go now with like ChagiPT-5, you could say, go research. What else is out there that's doing this? Tell me where the niche is, like Jill's saying, like, where can I fit this in? And I've gotten, I've seen people use this very effectively.
Sid Desai
[ 00:08:39 ] Yeah, and I think, you know, if I can quickly kind of add to that, one of the ways obviously we've done it, again, the context also plays a role here. If you're serving a product in a market that is a consumer market, then obviously, you know, the cadence and the pace at which you get things done is a little bit different versus regulated markets like healthcare. I think validating something, a problem in healthcare can bring with it, you know, a whole lot of challenges on its own because you really have to navigate like the decision maker matrix, the red tape. You know, how things are always done in healthcare, which is, you know, very, very slow, and really understand, like, what are the leverage points, you know, almost like map out the entire workflow process. With the healthcare provider or your key opinion leader within the healthcare system and figure out what are the key leverage points where you can actually, you know, improve their service delivery by like five X or 10 X or even more. And in turn also help like with costs. Cause at the end of the day. when it comes to markets or even individuals there's really like three three or four key things that people want to save on right it's either time or energy or money right at the end of the day and i think money or actually even stress right And so I think really when it comes down to it, like ask yourself,
Sid Desai
[ 00:09:54 ] what is it that I'm actually helping the users save on? Or flip it aside and be like, what is it that I can actually help the users make on, right? So sometimes it's all about not just saving money, but it's also making extra money. And that sometimes, you know, can flip that business idea accordingly.
Jessica Angeles
[ 00:10:13 ] Yeah, that's a that's a really good point that you're making there, Sid and Igor, with your earlier comment about, you know, don't ask your mom as much just to continue to build your business off of your customer base. And in your case, Sid, with your background in healthcare. There's a little bit more validation that goes into those that maybe ChatGPT can't answer. So I'm definitely curious to hear what are some of the red flags or false positives that make founders think that they have a product market fit when they actually don't?
Jill Kravetz
[ 00:10:43 ] Yeah, so I can give a great example of something that happened to us. So one of my startups was called Gloss48, and we were, because it failed, we were a marketplace for independent beauty brands. So it's all the, like, tens of thousands of beauty brands that you don't find at a Sephora or CVS or department store. And long story short, we raised money, we launched. And the first month or two were amazing. It was like amazing. Everybody was shopping. We were so excited. We're like, 'Yeah, we did it.' And then. It was literally December of the year we launched. And December should be a pretty good month for e-commerce beauty. And it was terrible. We took a complete nosedive. And what we realized the hard way was that all of our friends and family, this goes back to the mom test, unfortunately. All of our friends and family and all of our supporters and our investors and everyone, they were so excited about what we were doing. We had early press because we were brand new on the scene and we were this great startup and it was all like a huge honeymoon.
Jill Kravetz
[ 00:11:50 ] And then people were like, all right, let's move on to the next thing. And they actually weren't that interested in shopping our site. And so we sort of figured out the red flag here was we thought we had product market fit, but we really just had a lot of great support from friendly people and supporters.
Jill Kravetz
[ 00:12:10 ] That's why it is really, really important to make sure when you're testing your product or your venture that you're really... talking to your customer, not to people who just like, like what you're doing, but, you know, to Sid's point, like really looking at how are you fitting into their workflow? What, what need are you meeting for them specifically? And, and not relying on just kind of, you know, people who think you're great or just this early, you know, honeymoon. We did eventually find product market fit, but it took a little while longer and we did have a false start, which made it really hard to raise more money because our traction was very bumpy. So, yeah, so that's one example of kind of red flags.
Igor Belagorudsky
[ 00:12:54 ] There's a very common. false positive that i see out there which is a little kind of scary because uh revenue does not equal product market fit um and a lot of companies find that out a little too late uh like a really good example is like let's say you have a startup and you get clients and they're paying for it and you think everything's great you might have some secret inner thing that a different demographic of clients would pay 10x for if you had just realized it Right. I'm seeing people in the chat like I think Nick Anderson here says, you know, the Henry Ford quote, for example. Right. If you came up with, you know, roller skates for horses. Right. To make a crazy example. But roller skates for horses to make horses faster. You know, people might buy that. But what you just invented was roller skates, which is a bigger market than horses, maybe.
Igor Belagorudsky
[ 00:13:58 ] I think more people have roller skates than horses, I guess.
Igor Belagorudsky
[ 00:14:02 ] Yeah, there's a really good example. So I used to be an investor in a company. They sold, so I'm no longer an investor. It was a CRM. And a CRM is a pretty commodity thing, right? There's HubSpot, there's like Addio, there's a million CRMs out there. Going back to the point of just because there's something out there doesn't mean there can't be another one. But they had a CRM, they had revenue, and then they kind of took us to... took a step back and looked at who their users are and realized that they were selling very generically. Here's a CRM with AI. This was a couple of years ago, so AI was still new and fresh. But they realized that some of their biggest clients were logistics companies. They never thought about, never marketed to, but somehow word got around that here's a CRM that's specifically good for some reason, some feature, if you are like a Merc. Not Merc. What's that big one with the ships? Starts with an M.
Igor Belagorudsky
[ 00:15:02 ] The big logistics, like the big ships that you see with the trucks or whatever. And so they all started using CRM. And so they pivoted, and they said, 'Okay, like we're making a couple of million dollars a year, but $2 million a year is from this company. Let's start marketing to those companies specifically. They rebranded the whole CRM. They changed the colors to be a little bit more industrial and it just took off. But had they not done that, they would have never really found product market fit, but they would have had a semi-successful company because they had revenue.
Igor Belagorudsky
[ 00:15:37 ] Yeah, it's scary, actually.
Jessica Angeles
[ 00:15:40 ] Yeah. And in the conversation of customers and, you know, trying to get as many conversations in to validate your product or your business, Sid, I'm curious to hear, since you had kind of a balance of both the patients, but also. a lot of the, not just the patients, but the people that are offering the support as your two audiences trying to balance through. So I'm curious to hear when you were just starting, what do you recommend in terms of the number of customer conversations that someone should aim for as they're starting off and building their business?
Sid Desai
[ 00:16:17 ] Yeah, I mean, honestly, it all depends, right? I think in some cases, you correctly identified that in our case, we have really two kind of end customers, right? First, it's the end user that uses our product, and they'll always have responses to our questions based on their lived experience. you know, if they're facing high amounts of stress and anxiety while being hospitalized, of course, their urgency and their need is going to be that much more powerful. And we did, you know, talk to at least, you know, 40 to 50 of these individuals. And we started to see patterns much early on. We didn't really have to finish the 40 or 50 interviews that we did, but I think within about... 15 to 20, we started to see very common patterns that can be bucketed into different categories that clearly there's frustration here. There's an urgency here, and yes, you know, but I think the key thing for us is like the willingness to pay conversation because that's what makes it into a business, right? A good startup idea versus a business. We have to talk to these decision makers within healthcare systems. And I think getting like 15 to 20 decision makers within a single healthcare system can be very, very challenging.
Sid Desai
[ 00:17:22 ] And so you start adding your own hypotheses and potential bias that, yeah, I think. You know, if they start seeing the value that, okay, they're going to adopt this technology within their healthcare system, but that's not always the case. So I think sometimes it's really good to kind of find. The one or two people that you want to work closely with within a healthcare system, like call them your key opinion leader, almost like bring them into your design ecosystem and work with them to map out, like I said early on, like a process and then kind of use that process to figure out, okay, how is. go and use that and go talk to other people. So it's almost like you talk to a few people, get some feedback, design an early iteration of how your product fits into their workflow, and then take that package to the next group of four or five people, and then kind of proceed that way. I think that's been our best way to sort of gather. you know customer conversations and really kind of figure out what feedback we're getting not just from a product usage perspective but the willingness to pay perspective as well I will take a slight tangent for a second because there's different types of startups, right?
Igor Belagorudsky
[ 00:18:29 ] I noticed a few minutes ago, somebody was talking about supplement, like supplements, right? There's a very different strategy for vetting out a physical product. or like a food product versus a SaaS company like SIDS versus a hardware company, let's say like you came up with some sort of a widget or something like that. There are very different strategies. I know there's a mix of people on this call. But specifically, because I'm seeing some of the folks.
Igor Belagorudsky
[ 00:19:04 ] Social media is a really good litmus test these days. For interest in a physical product, whether it's edible or not, right— like I get a lot of content on Instagram of, 'Here's a new widget I found' or 'Here's a new uh, you know, protein thing I found.' If you could build a following and people respond to it, that's a pretty good indicator that there's interest.
Jessica Angeles
[ 00:19:37 ] I'm curious too, once you're garnering interest, and maybe Jill, you can jump in here as well.
Jessica Angeles
[ 00:19:44 ] What kinds of questions would get you the most honest and useful feedback from customers?
Jessica Angeles
[ 00:19:51 ] What kinds of questions?
Jill Kravetz
[ 00:19:55 ] I mean, I think that.
Jill Kravetz
[ 00:19:59 ] Again, back to Sid's point, like asking them not just like, would you buy this thing or not? It's more about what is your, if you think about the problem you're trying to solve, put the problem in context of their. their life, their day, their whatever, and ask questions about how it fits into that. So almost try to make it their idea, like try to ask them questions where you actually hear the idea from them. Like, wouldn't it be great to blah, blah, blah. And so, like, for example, I founded a company called Mini Lux, which is a chain of nail and waxing salons in the Boston area and across the U. S. And, you know, one of the things we did very early on before we started it was we did a bunch of research and we asked people. If you could create a new nail salon concept, what would be important to you? And so we allowed them to sort of come up with their own attributes. And it was interesting because what we found was they said, a lot of them said it was, you know, the atmosphere and the experience.
Jill Kravetz
[ 00:21:02 ] And then, third, was cleanliness. And if you've been to a Minilux, you know, one of our core thrusts at the very beginning was this kind of, it was a beautiful space and the experience and everything. And then the second we opened, everyone talked about how clean it was. And that became the number one thing. So you kind of have to get a full range of, you know, what's important to the customer or consumer.
Jill Kravetz
[ 00:21:28 ] and then figure out if your idea fits in there and then you can get more detailed. I like doing more of like a small focus group with your customer, just a very broad focus group to understand. What are the key themes that are coming out? And then do quantitative research where you take those key themes and you ask more specific questions. And you can get a little bit closer to how much are you willing to pay? You probably can never get quite there. So I like kind of taking a broader approach and then and then going more specific with a larger and a larger sample.
Jessica Angeles
[ 00:22:07 ] This is this is really great. And as you can see, there's different different modes of gathering customer feedback. Igor, you're mentioning social media. Jill, you're flagging focus groups as a really good place to get started. Sid, you're saying focus on those two major people and major audiences to continue to grow and learn more on how your business can really fit their needs. So this is really great information. This brings me to my next question, which is once you're gathering all of this feedback, let's say you got some positive feedback from potential customers. What should a founder do next?
Igor Belagorudsky
[ 00:22:44 ] At what stage? Do they already have something or still idea stage?
Jessica Angeles
[ 00:22:49 ] Let's start with idea and then build from there.
Igor Belagorudsky
[ 00:22:53 ] Yeah, well, idea, Sage, I was actually just responding to Sebastian in the chat.
Igor Belagorudsky
[ 00:23:00 ] Go to some events, talk to people, right?
Igor Belagorudsky
[ 00:23:05 ] This, again, comes back to validating, right? uh and something i don't do enough of honestly i'll even i'll even share with you guys i'll uh last year i had an amazing idea like literally with sebastian like you said oh this probably does not exist how odd so i freaking went and built it what a waste Because it's a great idea. I use it. I use it every day to this day. And I'm the only one. And there's a pretty website. And it's scalable.
Igor Belagorudsky
[ 00:23:40 ] And, you know, you can register and everything. And then afterwards, I'm like, I'm not seeing any new users. I went and started talking to people. And literally everyone, they started out with, oh, that's an interesting idea. And then 30 seconds later, they couldn't come up with a way to use it. I'm like, well, that's not enough then. I'll throw a link in the chat in a second so you guys can.
Sid Desai
[ 00:24:07 ] So Igor, you basically just— you know— the core of this webinar is what makes a good business idea, what makes a good startup idea versus a business idea. So you focus on the startup idea part.
Igor Belagorudsky
[ 00:24:18 ] Exactly. I even gave it away for free and nobody would sign up. So, you know, it's, you know.
Sid Desai
[ 00:24:24 ] Yeah. Yeah. I think compliment is not validation. I think at the end of the day, you have to kind of translate that positive feedback into something more tangible. And obviously in our world, the tangible thing is, you know, hard currency, right? Dollars, contracts, even time, although it is a little bit more intangible. I think one of the biggest lessons I've learned as a startup founder is.
Sid Desai
[ 00:24:51 ] People tend to have a hard time placing value on something that they can't hold, like time. versus like money right which is very much a tangible energy so i think um if you can get somebody to prepay for your product even if it's not ready as you're building right there's you can take like advances on a product It's one of the best ways to get, you know, go beyond that positive feedback because positive feedback is just like them telling you that this is a great idea. I'm going to use it. The next question you should ask them is, all right, well. Can you put in a deposit so that when the product is ready, that you'll pay for it? I think that's when you'll see some trends and patterns.
Igor Belagorudsky
[ 00:25:36 ] Yeah. And there are some tools out there to help you prove out, like, if you want to take Sid's approach that he just described, there's things like AppSumo and others that are like really, really interesting ways to test that.
Jessica Angeles
[ 00:25:56 ] I know that Jill and Igor had mentioned earlier that they had had this really great startup idea. Maybe they started the business and they realized it's not going in the direction that I thought it would. Or this isn't actually a really good startup idea to keep in the topic of this conversation. I'm curious to hear, how do you know when to pivot or kill a startup idea? At what point did you know to pivot?
Jill Kravetz
[ 00:26:26 ] Yeah, it's a great question. You know, we stuck with our idea and we had we had some limited success, but.
Jill Kravetz
[ 00:26:36 ] it became economically unviable. And I think when we decided to kill it eventually, first of all, we were out of money. So that was an easy decision. But I would say, just like you would gather... a good amount, like a good sample of data to say that this is a good idea. I think you also should gather a good sample of data to say that this is not a good idea. But I also, so I would say, you know, really ask those questions. Try to find out if there's a way to tweak your idea to make it. to get to that product market fit. But I would say, trust your gut. If you don't think it's a good, if you're like, oh, shoot, this is not working. And like kind of all signs point to it. I certainly wouldn't give up. I'm probably more likely to give up because I'm risk averse, but. I would just get a lot of input and try to tweak it.
Jill Kravetz
[ 00:27:41 ] But my personal view is if you, you know, trust your gut and you know it's not working, it's time to pivot. Although I'm not a huge fan of pivots only because I feel like you're trying to take. a product and shove it somewhere else and you're not really looking at where that need was.
Jill Kravetz
[ 00:28:00 ] But there might be a new need that's come up as part of your experience. So that's a very convoluted answer, but it's a very tough question.
Igor Belagorudsky
[ 00:28:09 ] I've spun down more startups that have made me money.
Igor Belagorudsky
[ 00:28:14 ] uh and jill i'm with you like pivot soft pivots like hey we're missing this feature and that's why people aren't using it all day long hard pivots like uh i'm building a website but i shouldn't be baking cookies that's you're just inventing another startup right so uh So it's a tough sort of thing. But I will say, you know, for me, the membrane, the barrier, is kind of like, what's the cost of keeping it going? Right. So I mentioned, for example, app buttons. So app buttons has been live for about a year. My total burn rate on that is like 20 bucks a month. So because it's only 20 bucks a month and zero time, I can keep it out there. And hey, maybe it'll find its ICP accidentally.
Igor Belagorudsky
[ 00:29:08 ] You know, it's sort of like a roll of the dice sort of thing.
Igor Belagorudsky
[ 00:29:11 ] But if, for example, I had other startups in the past where it was taking up 20 hours a week and it was costing me money to run it. And at some point you kind of have to kill it. You know, if it's not doing what it's supposed to be doing.
Jessica Angeles
[ 00:29:31 ] Sid, I don't know if you want to add on there. I know you've been working on NovoBeing for the past five years, if I'm correct. So, kind of looking at your experience from when you started to now, do you think you've had any soft pivots just based off of customer discovery conversations?
Sid Desai
[ 00:29:47 ] And pivots, in my opinion, are part of the formula for discovering. I mean, there's very few companies that have gotten it right the first go around, right? I mean, I don't know if you guys know the story of Slack. Slack started out as an internal tool at a gaming company that they use to internally communicate with each other. And then they've recognized that clearly this is working. Let's just go through a major pivot. And you know what happened to Slack after that.
Jill Kravetz
[ 00:30:13 ] So I think a lot of these, you know, 'How is that a pivot?' To me, that's like expanding to an adjacent market.
Sid Desai
[ 00:30:21 ] Well, no, their core product was completely different. They were like a gaming company putting out games. That was their product. They completely decided that we're going to completely change that. Twitch is the same thing, right?
Igor Belagorudsky
[ 00:30:34 ] Twitch started out as like, watch the founder's webcam.
Sid Desai
[ 00:30:41 ] Yeah. So I think pivots, in my opinion, are not a bad thing. If you have the resources, as Julia mentioned, sometimes you're just limited by the number of resources you have. And in a startup, obviously, time is the number one resource. I think we can all produce time. For the most part, money is the most costly resource a startup may or may not have. And I think if you run out of money, then you're out of pivots. So I think it's important to earmark— sort of, OK, I'm going to allocate a certain amount of capital towards potential experimentation towards these different pivot ideas and see if any of that gives me like a positive signal. And if so, then then you put in a little bit more money into it. Right. But again, as an early-stage startup.
Sid Desai
[ 00:31:25 ] where money is tight, that can be a bit challenging. And I think that's where you can use some of like crafty, you know, tactics, like some of the ones that Igor mentioned by, you know, using like apps, you know, especially if you're like a SaaS product.
Igor Belagorudsky
[ 00:31:39 ] Yeah. So the common thread and all the examples you just mentioned is that somebody developed some functionality and was using it for one application and discovered that a different application of that same thing is far more profitable right so that's a period of the type that i was talking about where you built the thing you're just selling it wrong And you're just, you know, repainting and selling a different way versus I built, you know, YouTube, but I should really be baking cookies. Like that's a different kind of pivot.
Sid Desai
[ 00:32:15 ] Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I've met at some startup events, I've met some founders, you know, thinking that, oh, they're building the next YouTube. And I'm like, well, I wish them luck because when it's gonna... I'm not saying it's impossible, but I think it requires, yeah, I mean, getting attention from people these days, it's a big deal, right? So yeah, just do your homework.
Jessica Angeles
[ 00:32:49 ] This was a really great. Those were all of my questions. So I do want to make sure that I open it up to the audience for any Q &A. Again, as a reminder, please put your questions in the chat. I'll start reading off the ones that have already come in. For example. Antonia had mentioned in the chat, isn't one of the biggest challenges in testing product market fit, defining how narrow or broad the customer base should be. Any tips for this?
Igor Belagorudsky
[ 00:33:17 ] Every investor will tell you to niche down.
Igor Belagorudsky
[ 00:33:22 ] Uh and I don't know if that's always the best idea. So like, you know, it's an inch— it's actually a very interesting question with very different opinions. I think, you know, if you talk to like 10 people, you get 11 kinds of opinions on this.
Igor Belagorudsky
[ 00:33:43 ] There have been a lot of companies that have found a lot of success in very particular niches.
Igor Belagorudsky
[ 00:33:50 ] But there's also been a lot of companies that have found success in, hey, we've got Slack, talk to people. You know, like we've got Twitch, look at people. So it's kind of like, it's very interesting. One good example of something, a conversation I had recently with someone, is the world is enormous, right? And so some of the answers to this kind of question are different now than they would have been. You know, 10, 20, 30 years ago, with the internet and like 9 billion people, right? Think about Facebook. Facebook, yeah, it started as for colleges or, you know, dating or whatever, whatever, but it very quickly grew to everyone come hang out, blah, blah, right? And so... For a long time, for 10, 15 years, nobody dared touch social networks, right? Because it's like, how do you compete with Facebook? And what people have started doing quite recently is super niche topic.
Igor Belagorudsky
[ 00:34:55 ] networks like i had a friend that is really into wakeboarding and he's like i'm gonna build a social network around wakeboarding i initially thought he was off his rocker i'm like just make a facebook group He's like, no, no, there's enough people that want to do wakeboarding. And I'm like, there's no way there's enough people. Yeah, he's got thousands of people. He's making a ton of money off this thing. People are selling equipment, all this kind of stuff. So it's a social network, super niche audience, very unique feature set for that audience. And even though I know one. Wakeboarder: The world is so big, there's enough of them out there for your particular thing. So yeah, you can go wide, you can go super niche— both are valid things.
Jessica Angeles
[ 00:35:42 ] On the topic of niche, uh, kind of industries and focusing there. Nicole had mentioned, for a startup business targeting a specific niche, what is the best method to attract potential clients and investors?
Sid Desai
[ 00:36:00 ] Well, I think it all depends on the niche, for sure.
Sid Desai
[ 00:36:06 ] You know, I think I'll first answer the investor kind of question. NFX has this really cool portal or platform called NFX Signal. I'll paste the link here. You can literally find investors in your category of...
Sid Desai
[ 00:36:25 ] of business, whether you're in a FinTech, SAS, health tech, AR, VR, no matter what. So check out that resource for sure. And I think as far as clients, again, go talk to people.
Sid Desai
[ 00:36:40 ] I think it also depends on your passion, right? Just don't go after a market. Or a client base just because there's potential for making the highest amounts of money there. It should also be something that you're deeply, incredibly passionate about. Like if I woke you up in the middle of the night at 3 a. m., would you be willing to talk about your startup for an hour to anybody because you're so passionate about it? If the answer to that question is no, then you're not as passionate, right? Because I can geek out about mental health and healthcare and AR VR like all night long. Anybody who's here is interested, happy to host a session. But yeah, I think it really depends on what you're passionate about.
Sid Desai
[ 00:37:18 ] All right. Perfect. Yes. An alignment of like, you know, your interests. And again, who is really dealing with the pain point? And then, yeah, as far as investors go, there's definitely resources out there you can use to kind of find, you know, domain-specific investors.
Igor Belagorudsky
[ 00:37:33 ] Yeah. And again, as I said, depending on your niche, there's conferences, there's like all sorts of, you know, industry-specific meetups and all that kind of stuff. But again, very, very niche-specific, independent.
Igor Belagorudsky
[ 00:37:49 ] Yeah.
Jessica Angeles
[ 00:37:51 ] And... Jill, I'll bring you into this next question because you're the one that flagged focus groups earlier. Nick Anderson had asked, when doing a focus group or in the validation stage, how do you ask questions in a way to get unbiased opinions?
Jill Kravetz
[ 00:38:08 ] I mean.
Jill Kravetz
[ 00:38:11 ] So when I've done focus groups in the past, it's very, you ask very, you kind of follow, there are rules around, I mean, customer research rules that you follow. And one of them is you don't ask leading questions, right? So you don't sort of say, you know, would you like this car to be red? You say, what color? would you like a car to be? So it's asking questions that are open-ended in a focus group. And that's the purpose of a focus group— you're not getting quantitative responses, right? You're just getting the big themes that are coming out. And you take those themes. And then, in the quantitative, you can ask more closed-ended questions, more specific questions where they can rate things, where they can give you multiple-choice answers, and you can really quantify the responses.
Jill Kravetz
[ 00:39:00 ] But I would say at the focus group, it's very much about... it's really having a discussion. You have a list of questions, like you have an interview guide that you're working with, but it's very much, you know, open-ended questions about, you know, how does this, how, you know, tell me about your workflow. What do you do? And so it's, yeah, open-ended. It's a short answer.
Igor Belagorudsky
[ 00:39:25 ] Yes. To Jill's point, asking the right questions is an entire science. Like, I have a little bit of a background in market research.
Igor Belagorudsky
[ 00:39:36 ] insanely difficult to ask the right questions. I get surveys all the time where I actually reach out to the person sending the survey and be like, 'This is a bad question. This is a bad question. This is a bad question.' Don't ask it like this. It's very hard. Chad GPT knows the science. So, if you have some sense of what questions you want to ask, you can go to an AI and say, 'Here's the questions I want. Rephrase them for me in an unleading, non-biased, you know, quantitative way.' And you might actually get some good results.
Jessica Angeles
[ 00:40:14 ] Anything to add there, Sid? Or I can move on to the next question we have.
Sid Desai
[ 00:40:18 ] No, I was intrigued about Antonia's question, but you can move on. I think we've covered, Jill and Igor have covered enough about that.
Jessica Angeles
[ 00:40:25 ] Yeah. Feel free to answer Antonia's question. This is what the open Q &A is for, though.
Sid Desai
[ 00:40:31 ] Yeah, I think I was looking at her question about, like, recognizing latent needs through surveys. I personally have not found a whole lot of value in surveys, to be honest. I think observation and really kind of being a fly on the wall is really a good way to sort of identify latent needs because, you know, people... People might like fill out surveys, yes, but I think you can't really put that whole journey of the experience that they're going through into words. Like if somebody is buying a product, they're buying a product to solve an inherent need that they have.
Sid Desai
[ 00:41:10 ] got to like really dig into that like that pain point is what you need to dig into and i think Surveys kind of remove that emotionality out of it. So I would, you know, instead of that, like focus much more like observation and interviews. And again, as Igor mentioned, asking like the right questions. And I think ChatGPT is wonderful to kind of come up with like, you know, non-solution specific questions, right? Like just focusing always on the problem. And then kind of figuring out, you know, what they're looking for.
Jill Kravetz
[ 00:41:39 ] Yeah, this is also very industry dependent, right? So if you're B2B and you're targeting a business audience, absolutely, you want to have these kind of very in-depth. interviews, the one-on-one interviews versus fielding a big survey. If you're dealing with a consumer business where your business model relies on having thousands or tens of thousands or millions of customers actually buying your product, then you do need a quantitative, you need a big survey to make sure there's enough demand.
Jill Kravetz
[ 00:42:06 ] But yeah, absolutely. So beware because we're all speaking from different backgrounds and we're targeting different markets. So be very careful when you use some of our advice. Just think about who you're targeting and does this make sense for your business model? I would also just say, last like little plug here, I would say, don't get too hung up on, if you're very early stage, don't get too hung up on doing things perfectly. Like I'm asking the right questions on doing step one, then step two, like just get out there and talk to people. get some feedback, try, show them a little bit of what you're trying to do. Like build a little MVP, minimum viable product, just build something in a Google sheet, like just, or use an AI tool to build something very, very simple. Just get it out there and start getting feedback. And then you can worry about doing things like perfectly. if you're a little later stage, then obviously that's a different story. But at the very early stage, you have an idea, you're just trying to get it out there.
Jill Kravetz
[ 00:43:09 ] Like it shouldn't be, don't overthink, you know, getting everything perfectly right.
Igor Belagorudsky
[ 00:43:14 ] Yeah. Yeah. I'll, I'll, uh, I'll add a little note to that. You know, I'm sure a lot of people here have heard that, you know, ideas are worthless. It's all about execution, all that kind of stuff. Where that line between idea and execution is has shifted in the last year or two. Up until the last year or two, ideas, user interviews, research— all of that was about building the thing. Even building the MVP that Jill just mentioned, even the Excel sheet was part of execution. Now, you have access to things like Lava Ball and all these non-technical tools that non-technical founders can use to actually sort of kind of have some sort of an MVP. So using those tools, I just had a good discussion about this with like a bunch of technical people recently.
Igor Belagorudsky
[ 00:44:14 ] Using those tools, I now put in the idea part of your journey, right? Because it's very cheap—just for a couple dozen dollars— you could build out some sort of a thing and see if people like it. And you're building it, but it's still part of idea.
Igor Belagorudsky
[ 00:44:37 ] It's actually huge. Yeah.
Sid Desai
[ 00:44:41 ] And I quickly want to say something. I think, Jill, you brought up something very interesting about, obviously, the audience that you're serving, the survey tools can matter. I actually recently saw a few websites.
Sid Desai
[ 00:44:53 ] When you go on their website, and if you move your mouse in like five seconds, they create like this pop-up. And in the pop-up, you know, they have like an offer, right? But before they give you the offer, they ask you a question. What makes you, you know, want to use this product? And they ask like four questions. That, too, is like a very quick survey. And I think people, because they just want to X out of the survey, they just quickly, you know, hopefully answer the truth and select something and enter their email and then hit submit. And I think that's also a great way to kind of get feedback. So I just saw that. So it reminded me of your comments.
Jessica Angeles
[ 00:45:30 ] And I know, Igor, you had mentioned briefly for some startups that are past their MVP, we actually have a question in the chat from someone asking, if you're past MVP and working on customer outreach, at what point should you start raising?
Igor Belagorudsky
[ 00:45:46 ] Oh.
Igor Belagorudsky
[ 00:45:48 ] interesting question uh depends on who you ask uh if you ask most like well experienced angel investors they'll tell you uh you should have started raising before you even had the idea right i know this one guy in new york who's like a super angel all this kind of stuff And his favorite quote is that he, for his current startup or whatever, is, I'm not in the raising, I'm not raising money yet phase, ooh, that's fun, of fundraising. Right, so you're always thinking about. the networking and the connections that you make. Most founders, not all founders, but a lot of founders, they raise money as much on the idea as they do on them. right like you when you pitch to an investor they look at your idea but they also look at you as someone to execute that idea right and so the relationship that you make the the uh reputation that you have all of that is kind of part of uh part of everything but A little bit more specifically, I mentioned
Igor Belagorudsky
[ 00:46:59 ] AppSumo a few minutes ago. I'll throw a link in here because I actually love AppSumo so much I have a referral link.
Igor Belagorudsky
[ 00:47:07 ] So click on this. If you buy something there, I get, I think, $3.
Jill Kravetz
[ 00:47:13 ] You're such an influencer.
Igor Belagorudsky
[ 00:47:15 ] I know. I'm an influencer. But anyway, so AppSumo is actually really interesting. So back in the day, let's say you had an idea. You bootstrapped, you spent some amount of money, you built it, and you're like, okay, time to fundraise to the next level. The only option you really have is like angel investors or friends and family, maybe like an SBA loan, depending on what your startup is, something like that, right? Now for tech. ideas, there are sites like AppSumo and AppSumo is incredible. So basically the idea there is, let's say you have an MVP.
Igor Belagorudsky
[ 00:47:48 ] You go out there and you say, listen, it's not fully built out yet. I'm planning to do this, this, and this, and this. When I'm done, I'm going to be charging $20 a month per user for this. But if you are an early adopter and you buy it now, is there a dead link? Okay, well, then go to AppSumo . com. But if you buy it now for $100, you have a lifetime membership for up to three users, right? So it's incredible, right? Because now let's say you wanted to raise $100 ,000.
Igor Belagorudsky
[ 00:48:27 ] If you sell 1 ,000 of these lifetime memberships, you have 1 ,000 early adopters that would love to give you advice because they just threw $100 at this. They want to protect their investment. right uh and you just raised money and you didn't give away any equity uh and you could actually like test your uh your mvp to see if it works i've over the last like six years i've spent a couple of thousand dollars on app sumo things half of them are trash because like you know they're startups effectively but half of them are now like charging 50 60 bucks a month for an incredible product and i paid them like a hundred dollars for a lifetime membership a couple years ago It's incredible. If you have such an MVP, because it's not for every type of product. Go to AppSumo, click around, see what they have. But if you have something that fits that model, I love it. Absolutely love it.
Jessica Angeles
[ 00:49:29 ] All right. And so that is all in terms of Q &A, just to keep track of time. Thank you again for answering all of those questions and all of you for asking such amazing questions. As you can see, you have people ranging from those that. are past the MVP, those that are still in the ideation stage, kind of starting to do their research and customer discovery. To wrap up today, I would love to ask one last question to our panelists: if you were to give one piece of advice, one takeaway from this conversation, to the audience, what would it be?
Sid Desai
[ 00:50:06 ] I'll start. I think just focus on your buyer. I think it's easy to fall in love with your idea and your product because that's what all startup founders— we all make that mistake— and you will make that mistake too. Try and keep that focus on the customer and their problem because that's when you'll find gold.
Sid Desai
[ 00:50:29 ] That would be my short takeaway.
Jill Kravetz
[ 00:50:33 ] I would say just go try it. You know, I get a lot of founders coming to me and saying, 'I need to build a website. I need a brand deck. I need a pitch deck. I need this. I need that.' Just go try the idea, like whether it's using AppSumo or using lovable or a Google Sheet or just verbally, whatever it is, like just try the idea on a very small scale and just get, start to get feedback.
Jill Kravetz
[ 00:50:59 ] That's what would be my advice.
Igor Belagorudsky
[ 00:51:02 ] My advice is startups are a numbers game.
Igor Belagorudsky
[ 00:51:09 ] It's sort of like the quote, 'past performance doesn't indicate future success' type of thing. Same thing in startups. As I mentioned, I spun down more startups than I've had successful startups. I've had successful startups after failures. I've had failures after successful startups. I sold my last company for $60 million and immediately had a failed startup a year later. So failing is not the end.
Igor Belagorudsky
[ 00:51:36 ] If you've got an entrepreneurial spirit, you know.
Igor Belagorudsky
[ 00:51:40 ] Go again— it's like chumba wumba.
Jessica Angeles
[ 00:51:43 ] Yeah, I'm old.
Jessica Angeles
[ 00:51:47 ] Thank you so much, Jill, Igor, and Sid. This was an amazing conversation. And one tidbit that I'll add, even though I'm not a panelist, is definitely take advantage of all of the resources that are accessible to you. The first step is joining and sitting in on conversations like this one to get some more advice and ideas from people that have already been through it. But don't hesitate to continue to take advantage of Startup Boston, to continue to take advantage of all the resources the city of Boston is offering to entrepreneurs. It's all free and accessible to you. So definitely take advantage of it as you're continuing to scale and grow. That's my little tidbit as a wrap-up for today.
