stefanmancevski

Niantic was an internal startup at Google before spinning out into an independent company in 2015. By that point they already proved out their business idea with a cult hit game called Ingress, off which Pokemon Go is based. So technically yes, you're right :)

Thanks for the resource! Though I would argue it's still not quite comparable to actually talking to and getting feedback from your target customer base. That's where you hear about the real pain points firsthand, and that is invaluable for validating your business idea.

Well I can give an example from an old startup I worked on in the past. We wanted to see if a CRM for job seekers would be useful. But we didn't build it so they could come. We repurposed Trello as a CRM, got a group of job seekers on board from Reddit, and proved there was value in the idea. Then we built it.

The proving of willingness to pay came from surveys of those and subsequent users that said "yes, i would pay X per month for this"

Zuckerberg ran his test drive in college. He reached his audience, sold them on Facebook, it worked, so he quit and did it full time. His burning passion was already validated when he took his huge risk. What we argue is you don't have to have a platform built out to get the same validation.

If you don't have the network, you have to build it. There's no real way around that. If you want to start a business and need to stress test your idea like this, you'll need to do outreach. Whether that's cold outreach or attending events or joining the right groups and communities, it's all about the legwork.

But the point is you can still do that on your own time without making huge sacrifices. Taking the concept of "go out and talk to people" too literally just serves to prevent you from actually finding and reaching your ideal audience.

Need to know where to start? Angel List, LinkedIn, Meetup, and the like. Write some cold emails. You can always build a network, and you should if you want to start a business.