Free Resource
Find out if your market is real before you commit to building it.
STARTUP STRATEGY PLAYBOOK
Market Validation for Startups
Matt Wallens
Fractional UX Research Lead · 80watts.com
- 01 What Market Validation Actually Is
- 02 Why It Matters
- 03 The Process: 6 Steps
- 04 Before You Talk to Anyone
- 05 Working With 80 Watts
Most startups don't fail because the team wasn't capable. They fail because nobody wanted what they built. This playbook walks you through a six-step process for confirming, with real evidence, that a problem exists and that people would pay to have it solved.
Not a survey of your network. Not a landing page with a waitlist. Structured conversations with your actual ICP, synthesized into a clear picture you can act on.
"You don't have to validate everything. You have to validate the assumptions that, if wrong, would make the whole thing collapse."
What's inside
- How to define your ICP before your first customer conversation, so you're talking to the right people
- Six steps from mapping your riskiest assumptions through understanding your real addressable market
- What trips up even experienced teams, and how to avoid it
- An honest answer to the question most founders skip: do you have a market, or just an idea you like?
Get the playbook
Free download, no email required.
If this was useful and you want help running the process, 25 minutes is enough to figure out if it makes sense: cal.com/mattwallens
This playbook is written by Matt Wallens, an Atlanta-based Fractional Research Lead with 25 years of experience helping product teams, agencies, and founders understand their customers before they build the wrong thing.
If you want to run this process with someone who's done it before, here's how that works.