Every year, teams across Europe spend millions of euros building software products that fail — not because the development was bad, but because the product was never validated. Validation is the process of replacing assumptions with evidence before making large, expensive commitments.

The Four Validation Questions That Matter

1. Does the problem exist, and is it significant? You need to confirm through conversations with actual potential users that the problem is real, frequent, and significant enough to motivate them to seek a solution.

2. How are they solving it today? Understanding the current solution is as important as understanding the problem. If people are solving the problem with a spreadsheet, that's your real competitor — not the SaaS tools in your category.

3. Will they pay for a solution? Willingness to pay is different from problem acknowledgement. The only reliable test is asking for it: a commitment, a pre-order, a letter of intent, or actual payment. 'I would definitely use that' is not validation. 'Here is my credit card' is.

4. Can you reach enough of them? Distribution is part of the validation. How will you find your first hundred customers? What's the realistic cost of acquisition?

Validation Methods by Stage and Budget

Customer discovery interviews (cost: time only): twenty to thirty conversations with target users focused on current workflow and pain points. Landing page with waitlist: traffic driven through targeted ads or LinkedIn outreach. Concierge MVP: deliver the product manually before building any software — if ten customers pay for the manual outcome, demand is confirmed. No-code prototype: a functional Bubble prototype costing €5,000–€15,000 that tests the core user journey with actual users.

A Real-World Example: Hanna's SaaS Idea

Hanna had an idea for a compliance platform for accountancy practices in Sweden and Finland. She ran thirty customer discovery interviews, built a landing page with LinkedIn ads for two weeks (forty-three waitlist signups and seven pre-orders), and confirmed distribution through LinkedIn and trade associations. When she came to us, the product question was answered. We built in Bubble with Supabase in eleven weeks. Her validation process took six weeks and cost approximately €800 in ad spend.

When to Stop Validating and Start Building

A reasonable threshold: ten-plus conversations confirming problem significance, five-plus signals of willingness to pay, a clear go-to-market path to your first fifty customers, and a version one scope buildable in under four months. If you have all four, the development investment is rational.