Why 90% of Startup Ideas Fail Before Week 2 (And How I Validate Mine in 7 Days)

Speaker A: Today I am going to go over why 90% of startup ideas fail before week two and how I'm validating mine in seven days. This is a little bit different than what I normally do, but it's one of those things where I'm on an amazing journey right now and I have to start sharing it, uh, with you so you understand where I'm at, where I'm going, and then you can apply the same principles to transform yourself like I am as well. For those of you who don't know me, my name is Ryan Staley. For the last two and a half years, I've been transforming companies specifically with AI for their sales, marketing and executive teams. And what's starting to happen as things evolve is I'm looking at take things to the next level. And I'm a very private person by nature in a lot of different ways, even though I publish content on social. However, one of the things that I wanted to start doing is really building in public and sharing with you what I am doing. And like I said, this is something that I normally don't do. Um, I don't know why, it makes me kind of uncomfortable, but I think it could help you and also help you understand kind of the why and what I'm doing and would just love to bring you along on the journey. Right. So right now, I guess my personal motivation is I want to free people from the grind so that their genius and their kids get their best hours. Okay. And what you're seeing is there's really, really unique things happening outside of what I normally do with work. But there's two other things that I'm involved with right now. One is I'm running a cohort for pavilion where there's 850 go to market leaders and executives, and I'm teaching them how to use AI specifically for their roles and their jobs beyond the core fundamentals of email and some other areas. Okay. So this is really, um, the beginning of advanced level details that I go through with companies and I've been refining over the last two years. So it's been amazing. And then the other is I got picked or selected for Lovable Shift. So what level shift is, is essentially it's almost like a in public incubator challenge, if you will ideate, design and create a product in six weeks. Okay. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to break down week number one and what happened, what I learned, because there's a lot of things that you could take away for anything that you're doing right now. And so with that, uh, let's begin. Week one was really around how to validate and ideate what your solution is. And so the real interesting thing I'm going to get to in a second is there's a lot of different ways you could research this and sometimes this might be seen under your nose. This could be in your Google Drive, this could be in your hard drive, this could be um, within AI tools. But effectively kind of the way I broke it down is like there's a way where. And forget session number one. There was a really good talk. It was Chris, Chris donnelly actually from LinkedIn, who not uh, from LinkedIn but publishes a ton on LinkedIn, has done a lot of great work. I didn't realize he was such a good entrepreneur until I saw him talk in some of the companies that he's grown and shared how he kind of ID idiates, if you will. And so one of the things that I'm kind of leveraging for that is due to my Expertise with using AI tools like ChatGPT or Gemini or Perplexity, is I'm um, leveraging that for market research. I'm leveraging details like first party data from things that I have. And this was something that really didn't hit me on how much of a treasure trove of I had specifically as it relates to sales calls, as it relates to customer engagements and rollouts. And those are really, really good sources of data for understanding what people need when you're building a product. Now the other, and the third kind of pillar of the, of the stool, if you will, is looking at review sites like G2 Capterra, uh, other examples like that where effectively you could understand really about like okay, what's the market through deep research. And that can be basically the vertical you're approaching, the person you want to serve their problems. Then you can look at first party data that you have and then third party data is like, how is the market responding to that? So those are three really succinct areas that you could ideate and validate what's going on in your business? And this, that would never have been available before. Like you could operate at the speed of light. And then the key stress testing questions are will they pay for it, what's the feature and what will get them there the fastest? And what I've started to learn, and this is part of the whole building in public idea or sharing what I'm doing, is a lot of the value comes in speed of execution, not just your ideas. But like how quickly you can execute and build. And there's some things that are blowing my mind that I'm starting to do. I leverage manus with with some really complicated use cases that I was really impressed with. At the same time there's another no code tool I was leveraging outside of lovable. That was pretty, pretty impressive. I literally built an app for prompt design and GPT creation from my phone when uh, I was effectively engage with something else. So I was, it was pretty wild how fast that I could do that. Just kind of on the fly. So that was the first session. So think of it with Chris Donnelly that was more of like a lecture. Right. And then the other thing actually before I get into the next session that that happened and I'll give you a debrief on that was the other thing they were talking about is pre launch validation strategies. Basically they're saying like start with a tiny demo, utilize wait lists and, and leverage landing pages for testing and interest. Okay, so some really interesting things there on, on that. Now the second part of what it is, they also had a resource with the Fireside chat and they had Danny Grant from jam.dev and Claire Vo from Chat PRD. So Claire, I don't know a lot about Danny. I think she took the VC route. Claire is bootstrapping. So really interesting to hear what she had because she used to be in charge of product at launchdarkly and then effectively started creating almost like a uh, simplified version to create a PR D guide for product managers. And so here was the advice that I took away from their, their talk which was really, really impressive because there's a lot of like psychological areas that I think are really helpful no matter what you do or what your job is. And if you're building as a side hustle or doing something else, this is going to be really eye opening for you. Okay. So number one is Claire mentioned this. I think she's like people will use a garbage MVP if it solves a real problem. Okay. And she's like basically focused on extremely painful everyday problems and something that people deal with every day. Okay. So the thing I loved about Claire's approach and this was like an eye opening event for me is she's like prototype whatever you're doing for yourself or her team and you know, like start to just share with what you're doing. Now I thought that was really good because there's so many interactions I have with AI transformation training teams getting feedback. I have so much first kind of like firsthand data and I'm not really synthesized it as much as I could have. So I was like, I have all these resources right in front of me and I've been ignoring them for creating a product. So I'm not going to tell you what it is yet, but I have a few ideas. I'm going to do some additional work today and finish off the validation process. I was actually out on family vacation last week for a few days, so I didn't get as far as I had on that. But I have all the details mapped out, a procedure and what I'm going to do and execute on and then I'm going to start designing and building. So uh, now the other part that they brought up, which I thought was really, really interesting as well, that I haven't heard a lot of people talk about is is founder market fit? Okay. So basically what you could do is they talked about explaining how your background, whether you're in, you know, you have the background in the, in go to market leadership like I did, or AI adoption or I, I did like large scale work with changing how Fortune 1000 companies, basically you utilize managed services and I would consolidate how individual departments would use it into more of an enterprise program. Like that's something unique. So those are unique things about me. Um, also a lot of experience in enterprise sales, sales as a whole. All these are examples of things that you want to infuse into what you're doing because you know at a deep level, uh, what that market is, what those people need. And then if you're solving for yourself, you could identify like, hey, what would make this impact? Amazing, we'll make this suck. Right? Um, okay. So then, then another thing they hit on, which I thought was, you know, amazing was really about scaling and modernization. So like, you know, I think, I think it was Claire mentioned is like validate first and scale second. And really what that is is like she was of the mindset and the belief of like, hey, like I don't care if like when she started she only charged like a couple dollars per month for her product. And then as she added more features, she kept raising the price because her concept was like, all right, I'm going to make this better than ChatGPT or I need people to basically have a real simple way to use this and it needs to be less than ChatGPT to start, which I thought was kind of interesting. Now Danny went the other way and started with free and low cost. Claire just started with like, I think some usage but like super, super, uh, low cost, like that $2 a month area. One of the things that's really important is test with the credit card. So that's the other thing. Uh, and then the other way the is really around like focusing on your distribution. So that's like the social aspects. And one of the things that she was saying is like that takes a long time to build and you could do that over a period of like 5 to 10 years. Now it doesn't need to take that long, but the idea is like mentally you need to prepare yourself of like this is going to be a 5 to 10 year journey. All right, now last but not least, and I think this is the most valuable is psychology aspect, right? And how to have like strong entrepreneurial psychology. And I think like the one thing that really hit home with me was like she kind of talked about, actually both of them talked about the mental fortitude you need for early startup stages. And the phrase of you are not your product really resonated with me because like at the end of the day, like even if your product sucks or you get haters or whatever, that's not you, right? And like with me, like, even if it fails, like it's all going to work out, it's okay. That's uh, the richest data sources failing. So that you could learn from that, right? And the other thing that she mentioned is, is competition is a positive sign of a valuable market, right? And so that was one of the other areas I thought was really, really interesting. And the other thing when you have a bootstrap mindset is really to be banning down. You want people to bang down your door with to like get your help, right? So I mean, just to kind of summarize it as a, as a quick recap, what we went through is ideation, right? Like how to synthesize like either data that you already have or leveraging large language models to bring that down. And this doesn't just need to be for lovable. This could be, you know, this could be for bolt, this could be for cursor. If you're more advanced, it doesn't matter. But like I, uh, was really refreshing because it's much different than what a lot of other people have talked about. Then the other piece to talk through is really the process of managing through that, validating interest, validating that it's, it's a, a fit for you as a person. And then also the entrepreneurial psychology of like realizing you are not your product and that this is gonna be a long game over the next five to 10 years. So anyways, it was just something I wanted to share with you. Next week is uh, phase two, or step two I should say that's more design and start building. So I'm gonna walk through what that is. I've done some vibe coding, if you will before and built things for myself. However, I'm starting to, like I said, expand and look at this. And one of the big things for me is like I have a lot of different focus areas. So I'm really looking at this as like a fun initiative that I could take on outside of work of other things so that I could start building products. And it's something I've always wanted to do and so I kind of took it on as a hobby. But going through, uh, step two, I should say is. Or week two is more around that design and build phase. So I'll be back. I'll share that with you. I might even show you kind of like the feedback I'm getting from those 850 go to market executives I'm working with because that's pretty wild too in terms of like there's companies as big as Amazon and that all the way to solopreneurs. So really, really wide group of folks I'm working with. Anyways, appreciate you joining me today. This is a lot of fun. Like I said, this is old school. It's not an explainer video. But I think this is going to be really cool if I go through and do the whole series and share with you regardless of what happens and my journey. So then you could do the same thing. All right, hope you enjoy this and I will see you all on the next episode.