Stop Building. Start Validating.
Look, I didn’t wake up one day and decide to write about validation.
I arrived here the slow, expensive way.
I spent three years building a creative product business that never made money from strangers. I designed, illustrated, sourced, tested, refined. I did everything except check whether anyone was actually waiting for what I was making.
When I finally looked at the numbers properly, the story was painfully clear.
I invested roughly £500 and 200 hours creating products.
I spent about 6 hours marketing them.
I launched to 18 email subscribers and an Instagram account with mostly friends and family.
I made £250 in revenue.
14 of those sales were people I knew. One was my mum.
That wasn’t a marketing problem. It wasn’t a quality problem. Or a sales problem.
It was an order-of-operations problem.
What I didn’t get (for a long time)
At the time, I thought the issue was obvious.
I honestly thought:
My illustration skills are not good enough. Maybe my art style is not quite right and my artwork will be way better if I use expensive tools.
Or the branding is not quite right. Maybe a new logo or my website is not exciting enough.
Or maybe the product photography wasn’t strong enough. And if I bought professional photography equipment, that would do the trick.
I definitely need more Instagram followers
Maybe the launch just wasn’t “big” enough and maybe if I took that £400 course that teaches how to launch I can do it the right way, next time.
So I did what most creatives do when something doesn’t sell.
I went back to creating.
More illustration. Better materials. A stronger collection. Another six months of work — and the same result.
Only later did I realise the uncomfortable truth:
I wasn’t bad at marketing. Or sales even.
I just didn’t have anyone to market to.
I had built a shop on a street where nobody walked.
Why building feels safer than validating
Here’s the thing I wish someone had explained to me earlier.
Focusing on the product and building the shop feels productive. Validation feels personal.
When you’re creating products, you can point to visible progress. Sketches. Samples. Prototypes. Tech packs. Spreadsheets. It all looks like work — and it is work.
Validation asks something different of you.
It asks you to talk to real people before you feel ready.
To hear “not interested” before you’ve invested anything.
To find out whether your idea is exciting to anyone else, not just you and your mom.
So most of us avoid it — without realising that avoidance is a decision in itself.
I avoided it twice.
And both times, the outcome was identical.
The aha moment
A couple of months after I had my son, I was ready to get back to work.
And even though I had made no money from strangers, I thought: “This is just part of the journey. The next collection will be the one that works.”
So I started planning the next collection.
Except... I couldn’t. I spent six months with complete creative block. Couldn’t settle on a theme. Couldn’t commit to a direction. Nothing felt right.
Looking back, I think part of me knew something was wrong. But I couldn’t see that yet.
So I did what I thought would fix it: I took a course on product launches. May and June 2025. I thought it would help me get my creative flow back and—more importantly—get better at marketing and sales.
By the end of the course, I finally had a collection idea. A theme. A plan. I started sketching.
The thing is, with a toddler, my working time was condensed to his nap schedule. I had to be incredibly organised—the second he was asleep, I was at my desk.
One afternoon in July 2025, my son woke early. Mid-sketch that was days away from becoming a finished artwork.
And suddenly, sitting there with a half-done illustration I didn’t have time to finish, it became painfully obvious.
The problem wasn’t that my artwork needed to be better.
The problem wasn’t that I needed a better launch strategy.
The problem was the math.
No amount of better artwork or better marketing courses was going to fix that.
So I stopped sketching. And I started calculating.
The shift that changed everything
What finally clicked wasn’t a new marketing tactic or a clever social media growth hack.
It was this:
Your product should be the last thing you build — not the first.
Before you design anything, manufacture anything, or spend months perfecting details, three things need to be true:
There needs to be a real group of people with a shared problem or desire — not a vague audience, but actual humans you can name.
Those people need to show real commitment before the product exists. Not compliments. Not “this is lovely”. Actual signals that cost them something — signing up to a waitlist, spending 20 minutes telling you about their actual problems, or pre-ordering with money.
The numbers need to make sense before you invest. Not in theory. In reality. With your current audience, your current time, and your actual constraints.
When I ran my own business through that lens — analysed every launch, every sale, every hour spent, every pound invested.
The conclusion was obvious:
It was never going to work the way I’d built it.
Not because the work was bad — but because I skipped the validation step entirely.
What I do differently now
These days, I don’t start with products. I start with conversations.
Before anything gets built, I’m looking for patterns:
the same frustration showing up repeatedly
the same workaround people are tolerating
the same thing breaking over and over
I’m not asking “would you buy this?”
I’m asking “what’s annoying you enough that you’ve tried to fix it already?”
And I’m not looking for enthusiasm — I’m looking for commitment.
Because interest is easy. Commitment is rare.
And commitment is what businesses are built on.
The maths I wish I’d done first
If by the time you finish reading this you’ve already forgotten everything I said, I want you to keep this one piece of information—because this alone would have saved me years.
If you want to make £2,000 from a £40 product, you need 50 sales.
At a very generous 10% conversion rate, that means 500 people need to see it.
If you don’t have 500 people paying attention yet, you don’t have a product problem.
You have a validation and distribution problem.
Doing that maths after you build is painful. (Believe me!)
Doing it before you build is freeing.
Why I write about this now
I spent 15 years working in product operations for fashion and retail brands—taking ideas from sketch to shelf, managing production, timelines, costs, and systems.
Then I spent three years making every mistake I used to help other businesses avoid.
That combination taught me exactly where creative businesses tend to break—especially when time, money, and energy are limited.
So now I write frameworks to help you avoid the expensive mistakes I made.
Not inspiration. Not hustle. Not “believe in yourself” content.
Operational strategy that works when you can’t afford to get it wrong.
I help creative businesses validate before they build, using operational frameworks and hard-earned mistakes from 15 years in product and operations.
Every Saturday, I share:
Reality checks before you invest months of work
The math that shows if your idea can actually make money
Validation frameworks that work with real constraints
Questions to ask before you commit to the wrong direction
Read more like this:
The 5-Minute Revenue Reality Check (Before You Spend Months Building)
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Work with me
If you're stuck on validation math or trying to figure out if your idea is worth pursuing, get in touch. I work with creative business owners on operational challenges—validation, production strategy, and business model economics.
