This is a free chapter from my book, The Honest Guide to Indie Making.

Validation. We all want validation. Validation that we’re doing a good job. That we’re smart. That we’re a good person. And us indie makers, we want a very specific kind of validation: Validation that the idea we’re working on is worthwhile and we’re not wasting our time.

That’s because all of the indie makers I know are full of ideas. Working on one project means we can’t work on another, so we would really LOVE to know that what we’re working on has the potential to turn into something. So, how do we do that? How do we validate our idea?

How I validated Harold

I remember when I wasn't sure if Harold was going to work. Maybe it would be like all the other habit trackers: you track for a couple days and then fall off. Well, there was only one way to find out.

I built a prototype and started using it myself. After three weeks of using it, I was still tracking. It was the longest I had ever stuck with a habit tracker by far (remember the blank journal?).

But wait, maybe I was only sticking with it because it was my product and I wanted it to work.

So, next, I showed it to some family and friends. My sister and one of my friends from college both wanted to try it. My friend churned pretty quickly, but my sister stuck with it for weeks (she’d go on to track for 5 months). But wait, maybe she's biased because she's my sister and she ALSO wants it to work and thats the only reason she was sticking with it.

So I added the link to the landing page in my Twitter bio. I didn't even post about it, I just snuck it in there. To my surprise, I started getting some website visitors, and someone actually signed up! A real, random, stranger from the Internets. Wow. Maybe I am onto something.

I only kept going because I kept getting more validation:

• I launched on Product Hunt and got over 300 signups without trying to manufacture a response, asking for upvotes, etc.
• I put up a paywall to see if anyone would pay and got a couple conversions from people I didn’t know.
• I saw retention numbers that I hadn’t seen in any of my six years working on consumer apps

I had tons of validation and I did it step by step. Why then, is Harold still not successful? What did I miss? I think I may have been using an outdated model.

IDEO’s “Three Lenses” Model

I encountered this framework early on in my career and it guided a lot of my initial thinking on validation. Developed by popular design firm IDEO, it focuses on validating three areas to know if we have a good, innovative idea:

1. Desirability - People want it