Post by AustrianStartups

Most startup advice tells you to validate your idea. Felix Günther reframed the question last week in our ELP workshop: validate your customer first. His core point: demand already exists before you show up. You are not creating it. If someone doesn't have a problem on their to-do list, no product will put it there. So the only job at the start is to find the people who already want to solve something, and understand what exactly they want to achieve and why. What that means in practice: → Stop surveying, start talking. Surveys put your assumptions on paper and hand them to the customer. Interviews give them space to tell you what actually matters. → Sell before you're ready. As soon as you can ask for money, do it. A vision is enough to test with the right person. → Find your first reference customer. Get that first pilot at almost any cost, learn from them, then use what you know to find the next one. That's how a sales system starts. → Keep your outreach simple: who you are, what you want, why them. Three sentences, no pitch deck. Felix shared this not as theory, but from building sales systems for startups. He's also an ELP alumnus and knows the room he was talking to. Thank you, Felix, for challenging how our fellows think about validation. 👉 Join our waitlist for the next ELP cohort: https://lnkd.in/dGF38QnJ #AustrianStartups #ELP