Idea Validation Form Template

The cheapest version of your product is a form asking whether anyone wants it. This template is a demand experiment wearing a signup's clothes: it measures how often the pain occurs, what people already do about it, whether they'd pay, and — the only answer that costs the respondent anything — whether they'll stake an email on hearing the outcome. Run it for two weeks before you write a line of code, and you'll know more than most launched products do.

Why these fields. Pain frequency leads because frequency beats intensity as a predictor of purchase: a mild problem that bites daily builds more willingness to pay than an acute one that surfaces yearly, and the four bands make the distribution readable at a glance. The current-fix question is the truth serum — the scrappier the answer, the realer the pain. "A spreadsheet with 14 tabs" is a buying signal; "nothing, really" is a warning that the problem may be theoretical, and the placeholder explicitly blesses unglamorous answers so people give them. The would-you-pay question is calibrated by what follows it: choosing yes or maybe reveals a price question through a logic rule, while a no skips it entirely — asking "how much?" of someone who just said no produces fiction, and this branch keeps fiction out of your data. The email lands last, after the honesty, and the label says exactly what it buys: news of the verdict. Handing over an address after answering four candid questions is the closest thing to a preorder a form can collect without touching money.

What we left out. Payments and deposits — this form measures willingness, not wallets, and no money changes hands anywhere in it. Also demographics (irrelevant until the idea survives), feature checklists (there are no features yet; that's the point), and anything that smells like a pitch — the intro admits the product doesn't exist, and that admission is why the answers can be trusted.

Who uses this. Pre-build founders doing diligence on their own conviction, agencies testing a productized service before staffing it, indie hackers choosing between three ideas with one weekend, and internal teams who need evidence before a quarter gets committed.

Make it yours. The hidden variant field is the power move: write two different pitches of the same idea on two pages, share one as ?variant=a and the other as ?variant=b, and your CSV export becomes an A/B test of the concept itself — same questions, different framing, measurable difference. Document mode keeps the form reading like a considered one-pager rather than a quiz. When responses accumulate, read the fair-price answers as a histogram, not an average; the clusters tell you which price story people already believe.

Decide, then say so. The ending promises a verdict either way. Send it — the "we're not building this" email costs you nothing and earns a reputation for straight answers, which is worth more than most launches.