Before You Build Anything, Validate Whether Anyone Actually Needs It
Aug 27, 2025
It’s one of the most common traps early-stage startups fall into:
The urge to keep building new features, even when they have no users.
On the surface, it feels productive. You’re working hard, shipping new things, and getting closer to “launch.”
But here’s the hard truth:
If no one needs what you’re building, it doesn’t matter how fast you ship.
Building Without Users = Building in the Dark
Imagine building for over a year, pouring time and money into “necessary” features, only to realize that almost no one wants what you’ve made.
Unfortunately, that’s not a rare scenario.
We recently worked with a client who was in exactly that position.
They’d been building a product for more than a year, and they had just one active user.
Still, they kept pushing forward, adding more features, making improvements, and postponing outreach, all under the common excuse:
“We’re not ready yet.”
That kind of thinking almost cost them everything.
Step One: Stop. Step Two: Strategize.
When they brought us in, we didn’t start by designing new features.
We helped them take a step back and ask:
What’s the biggest risk we’re facing right now?
Because if you don’t identify and address the core risk, all your other work could be wasted.
In this case, the answer was clear:
They didn’t know if anyone actually wanted the product.
So, we created a simple product strategy:
✅ Identify the biggest risk
✅ Pick a metric that reflects it
✅ Design quick experiments to test it
The Core Challenge: Finding Real Users
The most crucial challenge was clear:
👉 Find enough users to validate the product's need.
We picked one key metric: Number of active users.
If that number didn’t grow, it meant the product wasn’t solving a real problem, or that no one knew it existed. Either way, continuing to build was risky.
Breaking Down the Barriers
We listed all the possible reasons users might not engage:
The product doesn’t deliver accurate results
It doesn’t provide enough value to change existing behavior
People don’t know it exists
Then, we created a focused action plan:
✅ Fix the product’s accuracy issues
✅ Interview potential users to understand their real problems
✅ Use those insights to shape the product around actual needs
✅ Partner with a marketing expert to build a go-to-market strategy
The Turning Point: Discovery Through Validation
After just a month of fast user interviews and targeted improvements, we uncovered something major:
🔍 The target market was extremely niche, and the users were very difficult to reach.
Even with a great product and messaging, the acquisition cost would’ve been unsustainable.
If we hadn’t taken a step back to validate this, the startup could’ve spent months and thousands of euros going in the wrong direction.
This Wasn’t a Failure. It Was a Lesson.
The goal was never to force the product to work.
The goal was to learn whether it could work.
And learning that early saved the team:
Time
Money
Energy
Emotional burnout
Too many startups delay validation because they’re waiting for things to be “perfect.”
But guess what? It never will be.
You don’t need a full product to validate.
You can use a form, a landing page, a prototype, or even just a conversation.
The Key Takeaway
Validate users’ needs as early as possible.
Every new feature, and especially every new product, should be tested against the core question:
Does anyone actually want this?
Don’t wait until after you’ve built it to find out.