aka "The Bullshit Police"
Every business starts as an idea somebody feels good about, and that feeling is worth almost nothing, because no opinion is as important as whether a stranger will actually hand over money for what you are selling.
So the first question is blunt. Is the idea bullshit?
Don't build the website yet. The business cards can wait, and so can anybody selling certainty about a market they have never sold into. A business only happens when something is exchanged for money, so this plan tests that exchange and nothing else.
Checkpoint One: The Interest Test
Goal: find out whether strangers are interested in your Offer. Friends and family will lie to be kind.
The test: $50 of ads.
- Traffic: roughly 2,000 people, bought as a small targeted audience wherever your market actually sits.
- Offer: one headline, one image, one plain description of the benefit.
- Action: ask for something tiny. A waitlist signup, an email address, a click.
The result:
If 2,000 people see the Offer and nobody clicks, nobody signs up and nobody engages, you do not have a Traffic problem, you have an Offer problem, because the promise was not compelling enough to buy a single moment of attention.
A promise that cannot buy attention from a stranger is not an Offer yet.
Do not proceed until strangers show interest. That does not mean the idea is dead, only that the way you are presenting the value isn't landing, so go back to Mastering Your Offer and change the headline, the framing, or the Core Human Driver you hook into.
I ran the analogue version of this at nineteen, buying 10,000 flyers at a time to feed a lawn round, and we tested colour against black and white. Black and white won, which no amount of arguing about it would ever have settled.
Checkpoint Two: The Sales Test
Goal: find out whether a real human will hand over money.
The test: talk to people.
Interest is proven. Now get those people onto a call or into a room, and have the conversation most founders spend a year avoiding.
- Ask what they are struggling with.
- Listen properly, without steering them toward the answer you already want.
- Offer the solution, and explain how it solves that specific problem.
- Say what it costs.
- Ask for the sale: "Is solving that worth what it costs to you?"
The result:
If not one person will buy, you don't have a business. You have a hobby.
One sale to one stranger is the whole test, because that is the only moment where an opinion turns into money.
Checkpoint Three: The Maths Test
Goal: find out whether the model can pay for itself.
The test: do the maths.
- What does it cost to win one customer? Ad spend, tools, materials, and your hours. That is your Customer Acquisition Cost.
- What does one customer pay over the whole relationship? Not just the first transaction. That is Lifetime Value.
- Is LTV meaningfully higher than CAC? Say $200 wins a customer who generates $600 over time, and you have a 3:1 ratio and a viable business. Say the same $200 wins a customer worth $250, and you have a problem that spending more only makes bigger.
The result:
If the maths works, you have a validated business rather than a hope: people are interested, somebody has paid, and the economics survive contact with a spreadsheet. A business is validated when the arithmetic still works after the excitement wears off.
I built spreadsheets like this for the lawn round at seventeen and thought the evening was wasted, then checked them a year later and found plenty of the individual lines wrong and the totals remarkably accurate overall.
If the maths doesn't work, your options are specific rather than vague, which is the point of getting this far: reduce the acquisition cost with better Traffic targeting, raise the value of the Offer, or keep customers longer. Those are diagnosable problems, not a vague sense that marketing isn't working.
Why This Matters
Most businesses skip validation completely, going from an idea straight to a website, inventory and an agency retainer, and only finding out afterwards whether anybody was ever going to pay. That is not business. It is gambling with a longer settlement period.
My father wanted to sell classroom maths posters and would not pay $70,000 for a full print run, so he bought a $27,000 wide-format printer and printed them one at a time, changing the product as he sold it. The constraint was the point. It let him be wrong cheaply.
Each checkpoint costs the same kind of nothing: fifty dollars of ads, a few honest conversations, an afternoon in a spreadsheet. What they buy you is the right to spend real money later.
This is Validation at its most practical, aimed at the only question worth asking at the start. Is this real, or is this bullshit?
What Comes After Validation
Past all three checkpoints your Traffic + Offer equation is validated rather than assumed, and spending stops being a gamble.
→ Pull the Traffic Lever: scale up with paid or organic → Decode Your Traffic: find more of the right people → Build Organic Authority: create a long-term engine → Back to the equation: Traffic + Offer = Results