CommitValidate: Pre-Build SaaS Idea Tester with Real Payment Signals

I went through this loop a bunch of times and what broke it for me was forcing money and calendars into the validation, not emails. I stopped at the “is this a real pain” research stage, then did 10–20 calls with people who clearly had that problem. On those calls I didn’t pitch features, I asked what they do today, what sucks, what they’ve already paid for. Then I offered a super narrow outcome: “I’ll do X for you every week for $Y, I’ll mostly do it manually at first.” If a few people pay or at least commit to a pilot call, that’s validation. If everyone says “cool idea” but won’t schedule or pay, I kill it. For finding those people I used things like F5bot and Google Alerts, and ended up on Pulse for Reddit after trying BrandMentions and Mention; Pulse for Reddit caught threads I was missing where folks were literally asking for the thing I was building, so replies turned into real users way faster than a generic waitlist ever did.

I went through this loop a bunch of times and what broke it for me was forcing money and calendars into the validation, not emails. I stopped at the “is this a real pain” research stage, then did 10–20 calls with people who clearly had that problem. On those calls I didn’t pitch features, I asked what they do today, what sucks, what they’ve already paid for. Then I offered a super narrow outcome: “I’ll do X for you every week for $Y, I’ll mostly do it manually at first.” If a few people pay or at least commit to a pilot call, that’s validation. If everyone says “cool idea” but won’t schedule or pay, I kill it. For finding those people I used things like F5bot and Google Alerts, and ended up on Pulse for Reddit after trying BrandMentions and Mention; Pulse for Reddit caught threads I was missing where folks were literally asking for the thing I was building, so replies turned into real users way faster than a generic waitlist ever did.

The useful validation step is getting someone to pay, even if the product is embarrassingly manual behind the curtain. Waitlists mostly validate that people are willing to be polite on the internet, which is not a business model. I’d pick one narrow pain, offer to solve it for 5 people this week, and charge something small but real. If nobody will take that deal, the MVP probably wasn’t the bottleneck.

you’re definitely not the only one, almost everyone hits that “this is useless” phase mid-build lol honestly the best validation is getting someone to spend either time, money, or effort before the product exists waitlists alone are weak, but a simple landing page + demo/mockup + actual conversations works way better i usually try to ship the smallest possible version fast now, even rough prototypes or flows made in Runable are enough to test if people actually care before going deep into building