How do you know if your product actually solves a real problem?
42% of startups fail because there is no market need for their product. Not bad execution. Not poor marketing. The wrong problem.
And yet most founders never ask the one question that would have caught it early.
Not "do people like this idea?" That question is useless. People are polite. They will say yes to almost anything that sounds clever.
The real question is: are people already solving this problem badly?
Because if the problem is real and painful enough, you will find evidence before you write a single line of code.
Someone built a workaround. A spreadsheet, a manual process, a duct-taped combination of three tools that barely works. Workarounds are not signs of a niche market. They are products waiting to be built.
Someone is paying for something inferior. A competitor with real revenue and obvious flaws is one of the strongest signals available. It means the market exists and the bar is low enough to clear.
Someone searched for a solution and found nothing good enough. Search behavior is demand made visible. Forums full of unanswered questions are product briefs in disguise.
If none of those three exist, the problem is probably not painful enough. Interesting is not the same as urgent. Relatable is not the same as real.
The uncomfortable truth: most founders skip this check not because they don't know it matters, but because they are afraid of the answer. Building feels like progress. Sitting with hard questions feels like stalling.
Around 35% of early-stage ventures stumble because they build products nobody needs. Most of them knew they should validate. They just didn't.
If you are pre-launch and want a structured way to run this check before you commit to building, I built a free tool that does exactly that. Under 3 minutes. No signup. No generic output.
workarounds point is the strongest one imo. people will lie about wanting a product but they wont fake-build a spreadsheet for fun. when i sold my hosting biz, the customers who renewed for 10+ years were the ones who had cobbled together cron jobs + email scripts before we showed up — those convert instantly bcs you're not selling them an idea, you're replacing duct tape. most founders dont look for workarounds bcs you have to ask weirdly specific questions to surface them. "show me the messiest tool you use for X" beats any survey.
I think one of the clearest signals is when people try to solve the problem even before your product exists. Spreadsheets, messy workflows, repetitive manual work, hacked together solutions these are usually stronger indicators than people simply saying they like the idea. Also agree that usage matters more than compliments. A lot of users will say something is cool but never come back to it. Retention and repeated behavior usually tell the real story. Good discussion overall because this is something almost every founder struggles with early on 🙂👍
That's right. Spreadsheets and messy workflows are underrated as signals. If someone built a workaround before your product existed, they already proved the problem is real and worth solving. That is stronger than any survey. And the retention point is exactly right : compliments are cheap, repeated behavior is the only honest vote a user can cast.
The workaround test is the cleanest one. If people are duct-taping together spreadsheets, notes, or three tools that barely work, the pain is real. For dictation tools, I think the same rule applies: if users are fighting app switching or correction friction, that’s a strong signal. DictaFlow exists because the annoying part is usually not transcription quality alone, it’s getting text into the right place without breaking the flow.
The app-switching friction point is exactly the kind of signal most founders miss because it feels like a UX problem, not a market signal. But if people are fighting the tool to get value, the pain is real enough. DictaFlow sounds like it was built from exactly the right observation.
The clearest signal I've found is when users stop asking "how do I do X?" and start asking "can you also do Y with it?" — that shift from confusion to ambition usually means you've hit a real pain point.
That shift from "how do I do X" to "can you also do Y" is one of the clearest in-product PMF signals. It means the user has already internalized the tool and is expanding their mental model around it. That is when you know you have something real.
A good way to see if the problem you think is solving exists is to check Reddit and Quora to see if people are asking for help on that problem.
Also, I am wondering, how does your product work? Is it an AI analysis?
Reddit and Quora are underrated for this. If the same question keeps getting asked with no satisfying answer, that is a product brief hiding in plain sight. On the tool: it uses a structured framework built on 15 years of pattern recognition, with AI generating the output. The framework does the heavy lifting, not the AI alone.
The "are people already solving this badly" question is the one that validated Clipency for me. Before building anything I noticed creators and page admins were already manually reposting brand content for free or for one-off payments with zero structure. The workaround existed I just built the infrastructure around it.
The uncomfortable truth part hits though I definitely skipped some of these checks early on and paid for it in wasted time building features nobody asked for.
Running pmfjourney now to see where we stand. Curious what patterns you've seen most founders who skip validation entirely or founders who validate but then ignore what they find? 👀
The Clipency story is a perfect example of the right sequence: observe the workaround, build the infrastructure. That is exactly the validation most founders skip. Would love to hear what PMFJourney surfaces for you. Genuinely curious whether the output matches what you already know or surfaces something unexpected. Keep me posted.
This is a strong frame because “are people already solving this badly?” is much more useful than asking whether people like an idea. Workarounds, inferior paid tools, and repeated search/forum pain are better validation signals because they show urgency before the founder starts building.
I’d probably make the tool feel less like a generic PMF checker and more like a pre-build evidence audit. That sounds sharper because the real value is not motivation or idea scoring. It is forcing founders to prove that the problem already creates behavior, spending, or messy manual work.
One thing I’d watch is the PMF Journey name. It explains the broad startup outcome, but it may make the product feel like another founder education tool. If this becomes a more serious validation and market-evidence platform, Beryxa .com would give it a cleaner SaaS brand than a descriptive PMF-style name.
Same sharp feedback as before, and I stand by the same answer. "Pre-build evidence audit" is the framing I am keeping. On the name, the thinking has not changed but the positioning around it will. Appreciated both times.