The Entrepreneur’s

Guide to Validating
A Problem
How to find the right problem to solve

By Tess Dennison, Lyndsay Katz, and Lucy Lehrman

Introduction
Building a business from scratch takes vision,
intelligence, and bravery. It is demanding work
that can transform wide-eyed entrepreneurs into
budding billionaires or jaded cynics in a matter
of months.
There are dozens of reasons why founders might
end up walking the cynic’s path, but the big one
comes down to desirability. These visionaries
had business concepts that they believed were
groundbreaking, world-changing, and utterly
revolutionary. They dreamed up services and
products that they believed would set the world
on fire. But they didn’t test them. Or they didn’t
test them enough, or they didn’t consult the
right people for input. Or they tested them, got
boatloads of negative feedback, and ignored
it because they were so utterly infatuated with
their ideas. New businesses often crash and
burn because the ideas they’re built on haven’t
been properly validated. It doesn’t matter how
much an entrepreneur loves or believes in their
concept if no one else loves or believes in it
alongside them, and if the facts do not support
their theory.
The entrepreneur’s guide to validating a problem
We’ve seen this happen firsthand. At Bionic,
we do experimentation design, modeling, and
business testing in our Validate work. We work
with Bionic’s enterprise partners to refine their
ideas, research their ideal markets, gather
consumer feedback, test initial prototypes and
ultimately, launch a product in-market. Over the
past few years, we’ve seen a lot of confusion
among our partners about how to tell when an
idea has been sufficiently validated.
So, we developed a testing framework for
validating a real customer need or pain point.
Now, we’re sharing it outside of Bionic in a
two-part series because we believe it can be
helpful to any entrepreneur with an exciting but
untested business concept. This framework isn’t
guaranteed to sort winners from losers every time
or prove beyond a doubt that certain business
ideas will rake in the revenue. But it draws upon
methodologies that have helped dozens of
our clients distill their concepts, prove they’re
desirable, and build new businesses on them. We
use this framework every day.
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How to validate
a problem
A viable business idea must encompass three
things: a provable consumer need or pain point,
a solution that addresses that need, and a
business model to deliver the solution. All three
must be validated by running experiments and
gathering data.
The challenge is knowing how long to
experiment and how much data to gather.
There’s no universal litmus test to indicate
exactly when you’ve validated a problem. Do you
need to run another dozen experiments, or could
you have stopped three weeks ago? If you’ve got
This framework is designed to ensure that all
experimentation is necessary and helpful. It is a
high-level rubric that guides entrepreneurs and
teams as they work to see the full scope of their
ideas and confirm that they’re worth pursuing.
Once we’ve got a rough idea of the problem or
need we’re addressing, we need to make sure
it exists in both breadth and depth. We’ll do
this in four stages, each of which describes a
consumer behavior:

1 Articulating a
10 people who are vocal about this pain point, is
that enough? How about 30? 50?
less-than-ideal state

2 imperfect hacks
Exploring

3 to try new solutions

Confirming motivation

4 of the market
Assessing the size

The entrepreneur’s guide to validating a problem 3

Stage 01
Articulating a
less-than-ideal state
This stage is all about getting consumers to
verbalize either a specific pain point or general
suboptimal state, while gathering quick lessons
from them. We do a pulse check on some of the
problems that might arise and see if consumers
resonate with our assumed pain point or if they
uncover different pains we didn’t know existed.

Since this is the earliest stage of validating the

problem itself, running one to two experiments
with five to ten people in each persona type and
getting 50% or more of respondents to articulate
similar pain areas is sufficient to move into the
next round.

Experiments we might run at this

stage fall under the heading of
“sniff tests,” and might include

Digital intercepts
Finding assumed consumers in their preferred
digital communities (Facebook groups, Reddit,
etc.) to post quick questions and observe
community dialog.

Mini group
Bringing together two to three like-minded
consumers to discuss the pain points.

Video panels
Sending a set of questions to a group of
targeted consumers to capture unmoderated
video responses.

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Stage 02
Exploring imperfect hacks

Once we’ve confirmed that our problem is
pressing enough for consumers to articulate it,
we start to explore the nuances of the problem,
existing solutions and hacks that users are
trying, and the level of pain they’re experiencing
around the problem. Ideally, we want consumers
to share discrete examples of feeling this
pain and attempting to find workarounds that
demonstrate its severity.
How do we know we’ve ticked the box for
this stage? When a double-digit number
of respondents use similar language while
articulating their pain or mention the problem
unprompted during a category discussion. We
also need to confirm that their current hacks are
insufficient. If a consumer is surviving on their
own DIY creation and are satisfied with it, their
state likely isn’t suboptimal enough to warrant a
new solution.

Experiments we might run at this stage include

Customer Friendship Diaries

problem groups Asking research participants to

interview Gathering a group of people

Conducting a semi-structured
interview to verify whether
a customer has the problem
we think they have. If they
do have it, we can also use
this experiment to rank the
severity of the problem among
other potential problems.
make regular notations (using
text, video, and/or pictures)
about specific topics over
who know each other to
a period of time to gauge
participate in a guided
occurrence and severity of
discussion. Since they know
problem-related instances.
each other, they are likely
to feel more comfortable
sharing sensitive information
or calling out other
participants as needed.

The entrepreneur’s guide to validating a problem 5

Stage 03
Confirming motivation to try new solutions

Next we need to determine if the consumer is
in enough pain to engage with something other
than their current hacks. We want to assess
consumer reactions to a solution proxy and
need them to prove their willingness to take
action. We want to observe them making an
effort towards purchasing something or learning
more about our solution. Look for at least two
successful experiments before moving on.

Some of the proxies we might show to potential buyers include

Landing page
Presenting the value proposition of our solution as a landing page. Our measure of interest and
success is user progression through the funnel (click-through, sales, etc.).

Diaries
Asking research participants make regular notations (using text, video, and/or pictures) about specific
topics over a period of time with the addition of solution stimuli for proxy problem validation.

The entrepreneur’s guide to validating a problem 6

Stage 04
Assessing the size of the market

Finally, we need to confirm that this problem
is painful and widespread enough to warrant
solving. For a business to be successful at scale,
it needs to address a problem that is prevalent
among a large population. The problem
doesn’t need to be something that everyone
experiences. We want to get more significant
validation from our target user group; ideally 100
or more people.
Benchmarks for completing this stage are
variable depending on which experiments we
run. For instance, 5% clickthrough on an ad is
a great result, but 5% agreement on a survey
question about pain is not a good result. We want
to see at least one or two tests where people
gravitate toward agreeing with our description of
their pain and are looking to solve it.

Experiments we run to determine the scale of the problem

we’re addressing at this phase might include

Digital Call to action Surveys

ads test
Creating and running Google
or Facebook Ads that articulate
solving the pain in question
that leads to a “coming soon”
web page, tracking audience
click-through rates.
test Collecting data around the pain
points through a questionnaire
Distributing brochures or sent to a large subset of the
flyers referencing the problem target audience.
with a call to action for a TBD
solution, such as “visit our
website to join the waitlist.”

Although it’s often easier to tackle these four
stages in the order we’ve outlined here, they
don’t have to be sequential. And in many cases,
one or more stages will need to be repeated if
our problem doesn’t pass with flying colors. Say
we get to “Confirming Motivation to Try New
Solutions” and discover that consumers aren’t
reacting to a solution proxy. We don’t have to
kill it yet. Instead we can look back and if, for
example, we received some good, qualitative
feedback during the ‘Exploring Imperfect Hacks’
stage, we would return to that checkpoint and
see what we did wrong or assumed incorrectly.

The entrepreneur’s guide to validating a problem 7

Case study
Problem validation:
Healthy lunch options
Recently we worked with a client who was
interested in helping people improve their eating
habits. Our target group was professionals who
consistently ate unhealthy foods and needed
support to cultivate better eating patterns. In
our initial investigations, the main pain point we
uncovered was that eating healthy at lunch was
expensive, so many people opted for a $3 slice
of pizza over a $12 green salad for budgetary
reasons. The secondary pain point was lack of
time; this group had real trouble assembling
healthy lunches in advance. It was both cheaper
and easier to just eat out (and eat poorly) for the
midday meal.
Respondents assured us that, if they had no
money or time constraints, they’d be eating
healthier on a regular basis. Nothing but
overpriced salads and protein bowls.
Respondents assured
us that, if they had
no money or time
constraints, they’d be
eating healthier on a
regular basis.
The entrepreneur’s guide to validating a problem
We found plenty of people who articulated
a less-than-ideal state, and we’d seen some
movement towards hacks, like eating
prepackaged salads. However, our target group
wasn’t wholly satisfied with their hacks, knowing
a fast-food salad wasn’t made with the freshest
produce, and that low-fat dressings were often
packed with sugar. So, there was unrest in this
category, and we knew that eating healthfully
was a genuine concern.
However, before we moved on to presenting
them proxies, we wanted to double-check those
stumbling blocks. To be frank, we didn’t fully
believe that money and prep time were the real
pain points.
We assembled a sample group and gave them
$30 for a daily lunch budget through our
corporate Seamless account. Now they could
not blame the expense as their excuse. They had
access to the gamut of healthy pre-made options,
and no need to prepare anything in advance. The
system we created allowed us to track what each
person ate for the week, so we could confirm
that with loads of money and no time constraints
they’d choose bulgur over burgers.
We were not shocked to discover that, even when
the supposed barriers were removed, our test
group still didn’t make healthy eating choices.
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When we circled back with them, they told us
that it all boiled down to taste. Which sounds
We were not shocked
a little simplistic, but was the ultimate truth for
this particular clientele. They were struggling
to discover that, even
with the fact that green salads just don’t taste when these supposed
that great, which made it hard to pick them over
mouth-watering pizza. We were able to gut- barriers were removed,
check what people had told us and reveal that
the barriers they articulated were not the true our test group still
root of their pain.
didn’t make healthy
When we uncovered that the pain was really
around taste, that allowed us and our client to go
eating choices.
back to the drawing board. Our client was able By going sequentially through this validation
to tap their food science division and launch an framework, we were able to confirm that the
R&D project where they explored ways to make ‘Motivation’ assumption was correct but ‘Hacks’
unhealthy food healthier yet still taste good. and ‘Articulation’ were a go, which meant we
They’ve had several successes and been given didn’t have to go back to square one. This saved
substantial funding to continue exploring. valuable time, effort, and dollars as we moved
into the marketplace.

The entrepreneur’s guide to validating a problem 10

Why validate?
Efficiency.
When validating, it’s essential to make sure that
the problem you’re addressing isn’t just a real
problem, but the right problem. Otherwise you’re
wasting time and money to build something that
people think they want, but don’t actually want
— and they certainly won’t purchase.

The entrepreneur’s guide to validating a problem 11