started noticing this pattern about a month ago and kept a log to see if it was real.
obviously this isn’t scientific, but it was interesting enough that i kept paying attention.
the ideas that get traction on reddit tend to be easy to understand, easy to imagine using, and solve a problem people immediately recognize.
which makes sense.
that’s exactly the kind of thing people upvote.
but when i started pressure-testing those same ideas, a lot of them struggled with the follow-up questions.
what does the customer use today?
why would they switch?
how do you reach the first 100 customers?
what does the business look like before scale shows up?
part of this came from looking at startup applications for CoCreate Pitch and realizing that the application questions themselves are actually pretty useful.
not because of the competition itself, but because they force founders to answer the uncomfortable stuff instead of staying at the idea stage.
the strongest ideas weren’t necessarily the most exciting ones.
they were usually the ones where the founder knew the customer incredibly well and had thought through the messy details.
curious if other people here have noticed the same thing.
what’s the fastest way you’ve found to tell whether an idea is actually viable?
submitted by /u/Radiant-Ad-3792
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