That’s a good way.

Or buy your way to the top.

For whatever reason many of my newsletter readers are asking about this approach.

I am researching and will cover these. But for now, I am blaming the likes of Codie Sanchez for the popularity of buying a business! 😅

I ran market validation sprints for various corporations and startups. This was the debate we dealt with on a daily basis.

There isn’t a right answer. But here are some self-reflection questions I’d recommend you do at this point.

1. Are you willing to kill the startup if it validates poorly? Now that you’ve spent 3 months with a team on it, can you be honest with yourself if things don’t work out? The main risk sinking time into building out an MVP is falling in love with the idea.

2. What is your “validation” threshold? 10 paying customers in 2 months? What happens if you get 5 customers? Every time we were unclear we ended up post-rationalizing and over-investing in a bad idea.

I am also writing a piece about tech founders who aggressively launch new ideas and their interesting take on validation. Full disclosure: it’s not ready until Friday ,but you’re welcome to check it out here

Two things to think about:

1. How much experience/time you have maintaining a community. It’s a ton of work to keep it alive. If it isn’t a priority can a comment/discussion feature on your website’s blog work?

2. Not all channels are the same. With Facebook groups, people browse all they and get pushed your content. With Slack, they have to actively log in to check for updates.

I set up 2 mini communities earlier this year (a microSAAS challenge and a 10k Twitter follower challenge). Both are well received but it’s a lot of effort.

I spend a lot of time working with market sizes.

The first question I’d ask is the purpose of the estimation. Is it to prepare for an investor pitch or is it for their own internal use? This will help you figure out how “accurate” or realistic it needs to be.

Worth remembering there isn’t one correct way. What you’ve outlined is sensible. A good approach is to do it multiple ways, top-down, bottom up etc to sense check. Look at a big competitor and ask yourself if the estimation you came up with makes sense based on the competitor’s revenue and the implied market share.

Don’t forget to look for existing reports too. When googling make use of the image function. Sometimes the data points hidden behind paywalls are included in the infographics.