I see so many posts on reddit, people asking for validation. So I made a community-driven platform for it, I am attaching that link only: https://ideavo.tripivo.co.in
But my question remains, if you don't get any validation, why to take that risk of doing it?
I would say domain knowledge and experience. I've been in my industry for long enough to spot situations where my work will have disproportionate impact. The longer I am in this industry, the more knowledge, contacts and followers I have, so I can be very effective at building things, getting them validated, and finding users for it.
I’m not in the industry or part of a company yet—I’m still on the younger side.
I’ve had many ideas and I work on them, but nothing really takes off. I keep coming back to the same question: is this worth it? Especially because every idea I have, I run it by my friends—they love it, I build it, they don’t use it, and I’m left with a dead project, a half-empty wallet, and goals I could have pushed further with if I hadn't taken up the project.
Bit of an ad because I am trying my best to get my product out there everywhere.
> Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity.
You can tell because the product answers OP's question.
First you validate your idea by seeing if there is a potential market for it. Talk to people. See if someone is excited about it. Show them your work in progress.
See if there is already a company in that space and find a differentiator.
Paying users are very different than casual users. This marketability is nonetheless predictable though. Projects that solve a business problem of greater expense than what they cost in monetary charges pay for themselves, which is more than sufficient to determine product-market fit provided salesmanship and merchandising.
You’ve got to get over the “no one got fired for buying IBM” problem. I’ve been on the decision making side enough times to know that it’s hard to get a business to trust an unknown vendor.
There was a “Show HN” here recently where someone was creating a SaaS product to manage 1 on 1s between managers and reports. I got a lot of push back when I said there was no way in hell any company would or should trust their proprietary company information to a one man SaaS.
The author hadn’t even heard about other well known SaaS products that had that feature as part of their product (Lattice).
You don’t start a project with the goal of monetization without looking at the competitive landscape and market positioning.
He was completely blind to the idea that no company of any size wants to manage logins either. Every SaaS company integrates with SSO. Just talking to one person who knew anything about business sales would know this.
I wouldn’t even think about doing a Show HN without at least talking about those issues.
When working on complex systems (like anything involving long-running automation or agents), most of the real work happens in areas that don’t show up in demos: defining “done”, handling partial failures, and keeping behavior predictable.
If those problems are still worth thinking about after repeated failures, I take that as a sign the work itself is worth continuing.
I’ve noticed the same thing: if the shape of the problem is still interesting after the novelty wears off and progress stalls, that’s usually the real signal. The visible demo work is easy; the hard part is exactly what you said—defining “done,” handling edge cases, and making systems behave consistently under stress. If those invisible constraints keep pulling you back, it’s usually because there’s something fundamentally worth building there.
I've wasted far too much time in analysis paralysis, and not spent enough time trying things. Hopefully you can find a better balance.
But start with you: Are you building it because you want to build it, or because you want it? Are you in love with it as a project, or as a product? Is it something you want to use?
Then, when you have it as a just-barely-usable thing, give it to a few people who have the same need. Get their feedback. Does it actually help them? If so, then you may have something.