Market validation is the process of gathering evidence that a product or business model fits a real market need. It's conducted through customer interviews (validating the problem and customer), MVPs and early product tests (validating the solution), pilots with paying customers (validating willingness to pay), and pre-orders or crowdfunding campaigns (validating commercial demand at scale). The discipline is one of the most-important pre-PMF activities and the bridge between problem discovery (does this matter?) and product-market fit (are customers actively pulling the product?). It is the evidence-gathering that separates validated business hypotheses from unvalidated assumptions.
The validation hierarchy:
Level 1: prob...