Validate ANY Idea in 24 Hours
A Game-Changer Approach for Founders and PMs
Majd Alaily is a seasoned innovation and startup expert with 15+ years of experience helping businesses thrive. He has supported 20+ ventures, scaled his startup to 970k MAUs organically, and worked with portfolios generating $50M-$100M ARR during his time at Google. He has conducted 100+ launch & GTM workshops, blending approaches from Stanford d.school, IDEO, and Design Sprint methodologies to help founders succeed. Follow him for all things building, GTM and funding.
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24 Hour validation IS possible.
It’s not just possible. It’s critical. Especially when you’re comparing early concepts, and need decisive input to choose a direction to build in.
Yet, many founders stumble on their way to market—spending months (or years!) on products that fail to resonate.
In my experience, this is because they didn’t:
Address a real user need
Come up with a novel enough solution
Iterate fast enough to stress test their build
At Ruya Advisory, we’ve built a proven methodology blending agile and innovation principles to help you launch and validate, FAST.
You can do an entire run in as little as 24 hours.
Whether you're an early-stage founder or a product manager, mastering this process means you can create solutions tailored to user needs, avoid costly missteps, and iterate rapidly.
Let’s dive right in.
The Problem Diamond: Running Discovery and Validation
Step 1: Define Your ICP
NEVER start without knowing who you’re going after.
Identify the segment who will use (and ideally pay for) your product. This includes understanding their demographics, behaviors, and motivations.
Remember, “building for everyone is building for no one”. Try to find the right sweet spot between too broad and too narrow, or else your relevance and ability to impact the problem will suffer.
For example, Airbnb initially targeted budget-conscious travelers looking for alternatives to hotels, focusing on specific cities like New York and San Francisco.
Step 2: Prepare for Empathy Interviews
Skip all that “big data” mania.
Go as small as possible. At the early stages of your build, you need the kind of game changer insights that only real audience engagement can provide.
Best way to do it? In-depth user empathy.
Line up 3 to 5 people that match your ICP for 1 hour conversations. In these, DON’T talk about you or your solution.
Try to understand the customer’s world and uncover their pain points by:
Asking open-ended questions about their problems and frustrations.
AVOIDING leading questions or pitching yourself and your ideas.
Steve Jobs famously immersed himself in user behavior, observing how people used early computers and listening to their frustrations, which led to the intuitive design of Apple products.
Step 3: Conduct Immersion Work
Another great way for in-depth insights? Observation.
Like Steve Jobs, immerse yourself in the world of your users, observing them in their natural environment to identify insights they may not even be able to articulate.
Make sure to:
Watch how they behave when they face the problem you want to solve.
Take detailed notes on their workarounds, frustrations, and unmet needs.
A sports brand we’re currently working with did immersion work at gyms, trying to understand how women dealt with problems that their current apparel caused in terms of performance and appeal, and built their entire product strategy on the insights these observation sessions provided.
Step 4: Identify Problems
By now, you’ve seen and heard a LOT from your audience.
Time to synthesize these insights into clear, actionable problem statements.
Review your notes and look for problems that are urgent, painful, and financially significant to solve.
Choose the one you feel you could solve best, that has a high “pain” threshold, and that users are willing to pay for you to solve for them.
Dropbox, for example, validated its opportunity by targeting users frustrated with syncing files across devices, solving a problem they found both urgent and valuable.
Step 5: Extract Opportunities
To close the problem diamond, we extract an opportunity.
By reframing the problem into a How Might We statement.
Slack for example was born when its founders realized the pain of inefficient workplace communication. Their opportunity statement? "How might we make team collaboration faster and easier?"
This reframes allows to enter into solution mode powerfully:
Turning the problem into a question immediately puts us in ideation mode
“How might” allows to go broad in terms of solution possibilities
“We” brings the concept of a team effort in place, which can really pay dividends when the time to ideate comes
The Solution Diamond: Generating, Validating, and Iterating Solutions
Step 6: Run Discovery
Now it’s time to develop our solution. To start, let’s get inspired by what’s out there.
Who else is trying to solve this problem? How are they doing it today? What stands out to us and what can we learn from them?
Look within your space, but also into analogous ones. Other industries that have a similar problem to yours that they are solving.
For example, if you’re a SaaS solving for hotel inventory, you can easily look at warehouse inventory management, or even see how supermarket chains manage their inventory for inspiration.
Step 7: Brainstorm Solutions
NOW is the time to come up with ideas.
At this stage, we are going to go for VOLUME.
If you produce 100+ ideas, you’re likely to have 3-5 solid ones in them. If you produce 6 ideas, the odds aren’t in your favor.
Trust me, at this stage, quantity LEADS to quality.
With a current accelerator client we are working with, using the right prompts and techniques, we generated over 200 ideas in 10 minutes (that we then spent 3 hours unpacking afterwards!).
Step 8: Shortlist the Best Idea(s)
By now, you’re drowning in ideas (hopefully).
But which one should we go for? It’s essential to shortlist ideas and focus on the most promising one.
I like to use the DVF framework, ranking ideas on desirability, viability, feasibility and selecting the one that stands out most.
Going for one idea is great, but you can also try a few different concepts if you’re really set on exploring directions (don’t do more than 5).
Step 9: Prototype Quickly
Now is the FUNNEST part of the entire process.
A quick and dirty way to get tons of validation FAST, without having to actually build the product.
Have a quick run of which techniques you can use to validate your idea with users fast.
Zappos.com started with a simple website with pictures of shoes, and if you wanted to buy the shoe they’d go to a store, buy it and ship it to you.
Wonderful way to validate demand before building a full platform, logistics and operations.
Step 10: Run User Testing
Line up another 3 to 5 users that match your ICP to do user testing.
(Make sure to test with new users, and not the same ones from your interviews).
Plan out the testing scenario to include a comfortable setting and letting the user engage with your prototype themselves. Observe their behaviors and note down what stands out to you.
Afterwards, you can ask some open-ended questions to explore their experience even further.
Step 11: Extract Learnings
Have a conversation as a team of what you’ve learned from user feedback.
A basic framework to collect insights I really like is the one below:
Don’t:
Ignore feedback that contradicts your vision.
Overreact to outlier opinions.
Step 12: Build Your Roadmap
Congrats. You’ve done an entire cycle of rapid building and prototyping.
Now is the time to decide where to go, and how to move forward based on the results.
Creating a plan on:
Whether you persevere or pivot
Where do you need to loop back into the process (Redefine the audience? Do a better empathy exercise? Come up with a new solution?)
And run a new cycle from there again.
And there you have it, a full run from empathy to quick validation in 24 hours.
Do 3 to 5 of these and you’ll have a ton of insights at hand before even starting your build.
Have you ever done fast validation?
Will stick around in the comments to discuss this with you.
Well explained. Thanks Majd for this breakdown 🙌🏻