270. Testing Problem-Solution Fit for Startups for Beginners in 2026 | Bae HQ IncuBaetor 2/6

0:00You're excited by a problem. You think it's got a good startup idea, but you want to test it before you actually go and build it. We're testing problem-solution-fit. There's three key fits in the founder journey, right? You've got founder-problem-fit, which is, are you excited by it? Do you have an edge? Are you the best person to build in this particular problem? Once you've decided that, you now need to look at, okay, with this potential problem, with this problem you're excited by, are you building the right solution? and there's different ways of doing that which we want to get into onto and that's going to be our focus but you need to also understand really very carefully that product solution fit does not mean product market fit a lot of people declare product market fit way too early product market fit isn't just when you have a solution which is working which is making some people happy product market fit is where you can't cope with how many people are trying to give you money because you've got a product which fulfills their need.

1:02So product market fit is usually a sign up when it's time to really start scaling because so many people want to pay you for something which they know can solve their problem. So don't get ahead of yourself. Problem solution fit needs to come first. So in order to do that, we use the common term of an MVP, right? And what you want to do is fail fast. Your first solution might not be the right one, but that doesn't mean you give up. That means you just keep taking the information, getting better and better and going forwards. So I just use the term MVP, right? What is an MVP? A minimum viable product is a version of a product with just enough features to be usable by early customers to validate a product idea in the market.

1:50Thank you, Wikipedia, for that. And there's two methods of doing this. And a lot of people try to skip ahead again. And skipping ahead just means that you spend a longer time before you fail, which means more wasted effort. So you could have non-functional MVPs and functional MVPs about building anything if you do your testing correctly. And that's what the non-functional MVPs are. And by non-functional, I literally just mean they don't actually work. But that tells you to get the placing right. Does it actually make sense? Does it actually speak to the potential customer? And it all comes down to a customer obsession because the features that you want to build and so many people tell them about, oh, I'm building this startup.

2:38We're going to build this. We're going to have this. We're going to have that feature. Doesn't matter. It's irrelevant. And that might be harsh. That might be a bit savage. Sorry, but not sorry. Because I want you to not waste your time. I want you to make sure that you're obsessed with the customer and the problem so that any feature you build is because they want it and they're willing to potentially pay for it someday. So you need to build what solves real customer problems. Map out the key customer pains from your customer research and how your product will solve them. Then go back to the people you interviewed for research or find fresh people.

3:13Tell them, okay, I know that you're suffering with this problem. You told me about it. I'm going to build this. Does it sound like it meets your requirements, right? Does it sound like something which is actually solving a need, which you have? Because if they're not excited by it, then what's the point in wasting months building something that nobody wants? and in the age of AI, you can test faster, but you could also just keep iterating blindly if you're not talking to your customers. So here's three tests you can do. First easy one is the fake door test. You create a landing page. A landing page, if you don't know, it's basically just a sales page with one CTA.

3:53CTA is a call to action. So you're looking at by building this page out, when a potential customer lands on that page, is it enticing enough? Is it solving a problem that's hair on fire enough for them to click ahead? So you use pain points from the customer interviews to explain what you're solving and see if they'll join the waitlist. Will they sign up? And you can check the efficiency of this or the efficacy even by looking at how many people clicked on the link and how many people actually sign up. Because if you're getting lots of people clicking on their link and they're not bothering to join the waitlist.

4:28Maybe you're not positioning it correctly. Maybe the solution that you're suggesting isn't as enticing enough as you want it to be. Next is a step ahead, right, is the pre-orders test. It's the same as the fake door test, but you actually get the users to pay up front. And you can be very upfront about this. You can say, okay, the product's not ready yet, but I can give you a discount. Now, if somebody is willing to pay before a product is ready because they really need the solution, that's like shining star validation, right? Like there's top marks. If people are saying, okay, I want this so bad, I'm going to pay you money now.

5:06And you can give them an incentive. You can say you get a discount. And if it never actually goes through, you can give them a full refund, right? So it's kind of a safe betting way. But there's pre-orders and people do books, for example, people do all kinds of stuff. By having people willing to give you money, when they know the solution's not ready yet, that validates that you're building the right thing. And it can also help give you the money in order to build the thing that you think is the right solution. Finally is the Wizard of Oz test. And it's always one that sits a bit funny with me and you might find out why.

5:39So you can make your tool look like it's automated and look like it's software, but do it manually. And a lot of the early chatbots were this in a way. They made it seem like you were talking to AI, but actually there's humor on the other side. And this is all based on the basic foundation of customers don't care how the result happens as long as the right one happens. And then you can only build if there's actual demand. So let's say, for example, you're doing a matchmaking service and you say, OK, we're going to have the best algorithm to figure this out. At the beginning, maybe it's just a human being behind the scenes who's matching people up and deciding who's a good fit for each other.

6:19and what you can then do is take that information and see okay people willing to pay for something which is getting them results yes or no if they are then you can work on the actual algorithm behind it and this also works a lot in say for example when people do new software is at the beginning maybe you're just doing as a service you're just manually figuring things out working things out but later on you work out a way to productize it and by productizing it that we can really make a startup that's going to go hopefully to the moon. So when you're testing problem solutions fit, are you on the right lines or not?

6:54Are people clicking the link to find out more if you're sending them that? Are people joining a wait list? Are people paying to pre-order? Are people chasing you for availability? Are people saying like, when is this going to be ready? I really want this. And we do the same thing, for example. So this is the incubator async right now. So you could be listening to a podcast, you could be listening to this on YouTube, but this is part of a little program and you can actually get your assignments marked or you can join a cohort. Now, if people are watching this and they're all messaging me like, when are you going to do your next cohort?

7:27That is really good validation for me that, okay, it's time to do the next cohort because people are chasing me, right? And there's no point in me building something or making a big marketing push if actually people, nobody's really asking going to be, when is it next going to be ready? And you can keep iterating your landing page or your website or however you're doing it until you see these metrics take off. Once you're finding that so many people are joining the waitlist and people are paying to pre-willow, for example, then you know, okay, this is time to go. Let's move. This is demand is here.

8:01I'm building the right thing. My solution is what they're looking for. Let's go. So all of this, you haven't actually built anything yet, right? And this way we can then go to the function MVPs. When you actually start building the thing, again, you can use AI tools, you can build this pretty quickly. I'm not going to cover this in here because AI is constantly changing. The best tool to use is going to be different next week compared to what it is today. But a quick search on any chatbot or any GPT or any search engine is going to get you some pretty good results here, right? And there'll be more recent videos that help you too.

8:36So start actually building things. If you've got a tech background, obviously a lot easier. If you don't, then make sure you get advice from somebody you trust. And this could be going to events, it could be working with partners, but make sure you're not getting screwed if you do outsource your tech. And for those of you not in the tech world, or maybe from more corporate backgrounds, something big you're going to have to get over is just launching imperfect it doesn't have to be right at the beginning you can make mistakes if it doesn't work out it doesn't work out obviously where there's customer health or customer privacy concerns make sure you don't get that stuff wrong but a lot of the other times like if you build a tool which maybe crashes more than you want it to nobody's really going to remember like one thing I think many people can use which maybe forget about is you can actually use something called the wayback machine to have a look at early versions of people's websites and look back at how you can look back at how our website was, you can look back at your favorite startup's website and actually realize it was kind of crap, right?

9:37And when you realize that so many of the companies you look up to actually had some very basic offerings to begin with and iterated and got somewhere better later on, then you then know, okay, cool. Like it's not the end of the world if yours isn't perfect. Launch imperfect, have it to a small group of people, get their feedback, update it, keep updating until the feedback gets really good, and then blast out and try and get as many users and customers as you can. And this is a great quote that I love by Reid Hoffman, who founded something called LinkedIn. You might have heard of LinkedIn. If you're not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late.

10:14And this is the thing, right, is that in the startup land and startup world, if you keep trying to make it perfect, it's never going to be perfect but if you get something out there and you get customer feedback that's the best thing and it can be so easy for you to just keep planning keep planning keep planning okay i'm going to get my my my idea is going to be perfect it's going to be launched and everyone's going to love it but if you're not getting the feedback on the long along the way you're just building something so a lot of detail there maybe isn't really solving a problem and you need to be really cautious about that and make sure you don't fall into that trap so that's the end of this episode and this is the second part of six in the incubator async.

10:55If you do want to do the assignments and get feedback, as I said, you either can pay up and get that feedback from us or you can wait for the next incubator cohort. And if you do the incubator cohort, that'll be when we go, no, there's enough demand that we'll run that through the backing of patrons and our foundation support. So up to you. If you want to get moving now and you want to use the assignments, click the link. Otherwise, look forward to seeing you soon.