I spent 200 hours creating products and 6 hours marketing them. Zero strangers bought. Here's what £500 and three years taught me about validation—and why your product should be the last thing you build, not the first. The maths I wish I'd done before I invested.

My friend wanted to build an app. She had the interface mapped out—tabs, features, user flow. I stopped her: "You're 10 steps too far ahead." Here are the 5 validation questions I walked her through instead—the ones I wish someone asked me before I spent 6 months building products nobody bought.

You've analysed your business from every angle. You know what went wrong. But you still can't figure out what to do next. Here's how to know you've hit the limit of self-analysis and need external data instead.

Traditional startup validation asks "what problem does this solve?" This works for SaaS and productivity apps. It breaks completely for creative businesses. Here's why creative work needs different validation questions.

Everyone's writing their 2026 goals. I'm writing my "absolutely not" list. After 10 weeks of testing AI workflows and building in public, I learned more from what didn't work than what did. Here's what I'm strategically quitting—and what I'm doing instead.

Most of us set revenue targets based on feelings, not math. When I used Claude to reverse-engineer my £5,000 goal into actual sales, the numbers were brutal. Here is the 5-minute validation framework that stopped me from wasting months building for the wrong timeline.

I had data-driven goals for 2026. Then Claude asked one question: "What needs to be true for this March launch to work?" The answer exposed that I was about to repeat the exact pattern that cost me £210 and 200 hours in 2023.

Most goal-setting advice tells you to either follow the data or follow your dreams. But neither alone works. I needed something that could hold both at once: the numbers, the reality, the patterns… and also the ambition, the dream version of the business, the part of me that wants more. The framework has to let them fight it out.

I uploaded my 2023 business data into Claude and asked it to show me what actually happened. I already had theories. I wasn't good at marketing. I needed better sales skills. The timing was off. Claude looked at the data and said: "You built a mini-department store before you had a single proven bestseller." Then it showed me numbers I'd been telling myself didn't matter.