Product Validation
It has been about 150 days since I started my running journey. From the beginning, I would share both my wins and defeats on social media. Unfortunately, I don't have a large following or many connections and did not engage in my posts or stories. Despite a lack of response, I continued to share mostly to keep myself accountable.
A few months into my journey, a friend reached out to me. I hadn't heard from them in a while, so it was good to spend time catching up. They mentioned earlier that week they had laced up a pair of shoes and got on the treadmill for the first time in years. They were inspired to take action after seeing my continued running story posts.
Through this event, I learned while you may not always see a lot of engagement, you never know who is watching.
This experience has me thinking more about the concept of building in public. I have always kept my ideas guarded and embarrassed by my mistakes in building a product. However, the more I see how sharing my personal life has led to me helping others, the more I believe in building in public.
There are many benefits to sharing your work publicly, one of the most important being accountability. Sometimes we work on our products and don't have anyone holding us accountable. As a result, it can be easy to find ourselves losing focus and slipping away from why we started in the first place.
Building in public is also the cheapest form of product validation you will ever find. When you share what you are working on, the feedback loop is immediate. People will tell you if the problem you are solving resonates with them. They will ask questions that reveal whether your solution actually fits their workflow. That signal is worth more than any survey or focus group because it comes from people who are choosing to pay attention without being asked.
I have seen too many founders spend months building something in isolation only to discover nobody wants it. The product validation process does not require a finished product. It requires evidence that real people have the problem you think they have and are willing to change their behavior to fix it. A landing page, a tweet thread explaining what you are building, a short video demo of a rough prototype — any of these can generate the signal you need before you write a single line of production code.
The founders who succeed long-term are the ones who treat validation as a continuous habit, not a one-time checkpoint. Every feature, every pricing change, every new market push deserves the same rigor. Share what you are considering, watch how people respond, and let that data shape your decisions. Your ego will resist this because it means admitting you do not have all the answers. But the alternative is spending your runway on guesswork, and guesswork at scale is just an expensive way to fail.
Related: Proof First and Lessons Learned from Building Stuff That Nobody Wants.
