What platforms you use to validate an idea?

Hey Syed — great question. I’ve wrestled with this a lot lately.

Personally, I used to validate ideas mostly through gut instinct + building MVPs and praying for traction. or running paid ads. That… didn’t work. ( At least for me)

After going 0-for-7 on past projects, I realized I needed real feedback before building anything serious. So now I follow a rough process:

Problem-first clarity — I write out the exact problem I'm trying to solve, and who it's for (in actual human words, not startup speak).

Talk to people — Reddit, Discord, X (Twitter), even cold DMs. Not to sell — just to see if people are already solving the problem and how.

Soft landings — I make a dead-simple landing page (Carrd, Typedream, Notion even) with a “Would you use this?” + email capture + fake pricing.

Community feedback — This is huge. I’ve recently been experimenting with a platform that lets people vote and comment on startup ideas (kind of like Product Hunt but pre-launch). It’s been eye-opening.

As for tools:

Carrd for landing pages

Indie Hackers + Reddit + Twitter/X for real convos

Product Hunt for launches if you have something built already.

IdeaScroll for validating ideas you havent built yet.

Biggest lesson: AI made starting easy, but it tricked me into skipping validation. Getting real signals from people (not just AI summaries or survey fluff) made all the difference.

Curious what’s worked for you or what you’re currently building?

Validation is probably the hardest step of building any startup.

Mostly, I've seen success through consulting-based validation. Super high touch consulting services, layered on with the product, so you can see the customer experience through from end to end.

Then, just watch the analytics to see if they actually use it, after you walk them through onboarding & system setup.

That has been a cornerstone of the success for https://xray.studio

Hi Syed,

for era.sh (a markdown note-taking tool for developers) validation we used Twitter, and LinkedIn and talked to developers directly. We scheduled interviews with around 40 people.

To get our first users, we hit back to the former interviewed people and asked them for feedback. Some of them use ERA every day.

We are still in BETA, so I can't give you much insight into our marketing. Too early to make any conclusions or advice. At the moment we use HN, IH, and Twitter - we try to be active and interact with a lot of people which fit into our target group.