Let’s test if your business model will actually survive.

Hey founders/aspiring founders!

Bit of a long read, but I'm sure it will be worth your time :)

I have been seeing all these AI validation tools and posts on forums including Reddit, of people asking 'Can this idea work?'; 'Can this succeed?'; 'Would you buy this?' so on and so forth and it got me thinking:

A mixed bag of opinions on forums is nowhere near enough to base your target market research on, and neither is a generic answer spat out by AI. You may post your idea on forums which may not capture its actual essence and lead to people rejecting it. Your idea very well could have great product market fit but has reached the wrong demographic, or maybe it requires more of an informative approach rather than promotional, that is educating the market on your idea and its impact rather than just assuming people will understand (wrong positioning).

The same goes the other way around; people may positively validate your idea based on what you tell them, but they don’t represent the broader market and macroeconomics; they could get turned off by the friction on your website, pricing etc. which you did not think of. You just wanted to test the scope of your idea or offering and that's fair. The same goes with AI, it will scrape answers from across the web and give you an answer based on the typical industry, mixed opinions on forums and even SEO spam. It will treat your input as an isolated chain of prompts and not a conversation with context and nuances. Besides, I for one would not trust AI with validation. Is AI my target market? Is AI going to pay me? No.

These are just some basic examples to name and it doesn’t stop here. It critically comes down to one thing, amongst others of course and that is Lack Of Context.

 I'll tell all of you what triggered this for me. I was researching tools for my own business idea and came across a western global SaaS tool, that upon further research turned out to be an excellent fit. I scoured the net, visited its official website, looked at the pricing, used my paid AI subscription to assess it even further and I was happy with the results. It would streamline our business and make it relatively simpler for me and my co-founder and our clients and cost us close to nothing.

Then I find out through even more deep dive; to make sure there were no final catches, that because of RBI's international billing mandate, auto debits after month 1 would be rejected and even the workarounds carry 'good chances of rejection' which we cannot risk with our clients. We would need an international card or a digital wallet usually only given to registered companies already, which we did not have.

If I had not dug even further, we would never have found out till AFTER month 1 with clients to handle and that would have cost us dearly. The only foolproof way was to pay for an annual subscription, which converted into INR is tens of thousands of rupees, which me and my co founder could afford if we really had to, but it didn’t make practical sense at all without knowing market demand.

So after all that time and labour, we pivoted. This was a blind spot I happened to pick up on, and just like this there are so many blind spots out there that founders miss on that costs them time, intellectual and emotional labour and most importantly, money.

Most founders ask if people will buy but do not think about whether it will survive and what has to be considered to maximize that. That is why I am starting my services on 'Business Model Vetting and Stress Testing' which is not business model validation (there is too much of that) but model deconstruction. This will involve me evaluating your current business model to uncover the risks it carries, assumptions that can kill it, what to look out for and how it specifically will hold up against market forces in the future. 

For now, I am opening up 3 free slots as a pilot run. DM me if interested!