Comment by shalmanese

The best case scenario is you succeed after 10 years. The second best case scenario is you fail after a month. The worst case scenario is you fail after 10 years for a thing you could have figured out in the first month.

There's a very basic funnel you can define and the validation is inserting numbers into the funnel to figure out where (if anywhere), the business is. The artistry is figuring out where the rules are and where you can break the rules in surprising ways to make the funnel work.

eg: You can do customer validation on your users and ask them the following Qs:

* Have you ever gone on a group tour with strangers before, how many times? Under what circumstances?

* Show me your calendar for the last 3 months, black out all the dates you definitely couldn't have been open to a tour, what are the dates that remain as a percentage?

* How much have you spent on travel over the last 12 months? What percentage of that was the destination non-negotiable (ie: visiting parents) vs negotiable on a shortlist vs totally open to suggestion?

* How many tools that you used only once 3/6/12 months ago can you name right now? How many under the right prompting? How many did you totally forget unless you got the "oh yeah, I did use that thing a while back".

Start with the end result of how many people before a trip breaks even and work backwards to understand how many people need to fill a cohort before you can reach that breakeven number. Many people who are in your theoretical target market just can't do any trip for totally understandable reasons and you have to be realistic about the cohort you need to reach per trip at scale.

The art is figuring out which sub groups the numbers get weird in your benefit. eg: Parents with young children will always cluster their travel around the school calendar so you get a particular density you can build on but this is also not a group classically associated with fitness. Retirees have a more flexible schedule but also not associated with fitness. Are there other cohorts this might be viable with? I have no idea, it's your job to find out!

But rather than taking 3/6/12/120 months to figure out the answer, there's Qs you can ask that disvalidate your hypothesis in the first month! Figure out what those Qs are and ask those!

PS: I work as a founder coach, feel free to msg me from my bio if you're interested in talking more. Always happy to chat for free for motivated founders.