A couple of months ago, I spent weeks hunting down potential users, tweaking cold DMs/emails, and reaching out to 600+ people on Instagram/email to validate a SaaS idea (brand deal management for creators).

The results for all of this effort....? Absolutely nothing.

The product solved a real problem—but not one painful enough for people to pay for. The bigger mistake? Spending three months building everything first and then trying to go about validation.

It’s easy to fall into “my idea will be different” until reality hits. Real validation only happens when people give you one of three things: • Their time • Their reputation • Their money

So this time I’m doing it right. I’m building VibeValidation: a tool that generates custom validation kits for founders and indie hackers/vibe coders.

You feed it your idea → answer a few quick questions → get a ready-to-use kit: • Prompts to spin up a landing page/waitlist fast (Lovable/Cursor) • X thread templates • Reddit/HN post drafts • Tailored cold DM scripts • Interview question frameworks

“Why not just use ChatGPT?”

You absolutely can. But anyone who’s worked with AI tools in any capacity knows the cycle: endless prompt tweaking to get something that finally sounds human and works. Even then, it often falls flat.

This removes that friction and where speed acts an advantage—you spend less time iterating and more time getting ideas out into the wild and finding out if what you're building is something worth paying for.

Curious: what’s your worst (or best) validation war story? What actually moved the needle for you?