DEV Community

Discussion on: I am a YC alumnus & 3X VC-funded founder-CTO. AMA!

Collapse
 
__brianz profile image
Brian

1 - what 3 books would you gift to a friend of yours?
2 - how did you verify that your ideas had market value?

Collapse
 
mohanarpit profile image
Arpit Mohan

3 books that I would definitely recommend reading:

  1. The Score Takes Care of Itself: My Philosophy of Leadership - This is an incredible read about the attitude and process followed by leaders & winners. Heavy focus on mindset here.
  2. The Pragmatic Programmer - This book made me love coding as a craft and not just as a job.
  3. How will you measure your life - This made me think about my life priorities and start veering my life towards them.

Verifying the problem is a lot more valuable than the solution. This has been a combination of multiple strategies:

  1. If I know someone in my network who has worked in that industry (or adjacent industries), bounce the idea off of them and get advice.
  2. Ask for advice on forums such Dev.to, HN, Reddit etc to get people's opinion on the problem statement.
  3. Create dummy websites, FB Groups etc. and try to garner subscriptions for that group. Allows us to talk to potential customers directly.
  4. Google, google, google for competitors. How are they doing? It's unlikely that you are operating in a completely new space. If you're the only one in that space, find out what happened to the others. Are they big? small? funded? Having big competitors is great because it automatically validates the problem.

I hope this helps you whittle down your ideas to "the one".