Last year, a founder in one of my advisory sessions showed me a spreadsheet. Twelve months of development. EUR 40,000 invested. A product that did something genuinely clever with scheduling for freelancers. The problem? In those twelve months, he hadn’t talked to a single freelancer who said they’d pay for it.
He had an idea. He did not have demand.
I’ve watched this pattern play out dozens of times across 20+ years of consulting and running the Startup Burgenland accelerator, where we worked with 40+ startups. The founders who succeed aren’t the ones with the best ideas. They’re the ones who figure out whether anyone actually wants what they’re building before they build it.
Here are the five signals I look for when determining if an idea has real demand — and what to do if you’re not seeing them.
Signal 1: People Are Already Paying for Bad Solutions
The strongest indicator of real demand isn’t people saying “that sounds cool.” It’s people already spending money on something that barely works.
When Adam Wilber and I started Vulpine Creations, we didn’t invent the idea of premium magic products. Magicians were already spending hundreds of dollars on effects that came with terrible instructions, inconsistent quality, and zero after-sale support. They were paying — and complaining. That combination is gold.
Look at your target market. Are people currently spending money to solve the problem you want to address? Are they cobbling together workarounds using multiple tools? Are they hiring people to do manually what you want to automate?
If nobody is spending money or time on the problem right now, that’s not a “blue ocean.” That’s usually a desert.
What to do right now: Make a list of every existing solution your potential customers use, including makeshift ones. If you can’t find at least three, your demand signal is weak. Talk to ten people in your target market and ask: “What are you currently using to handle [problem]?” Their answers will tell you everything.
Signal 2: People Describe the Problem Without Being Prompted
Here’s a test I use constantly: have a conversation with someone in your target market without mentioning your idea. Talk about their work, their frustrations, their daily routines. See if the problem you want to solve comes up naturally.
When it does — when someone says “You know what drives me crazy?” and then describes exactly the thing you want to fix — that’s a signal. When you have to explain the problem to people before they recognize it, that’s a warning.
During my time directing Startup Burgenland, I saw a clear pattern. The startups that gained traction fastest were solving problems their customers could articulate without coaching. The ones that struggled were trying to convince people they had a problem they didn’t know about.
There’s a massive difference between creating demand and meeting demand. Creating demand requires enormous marketing budgets and years of patience. Meeting demand requires showing up with something that works.
What to do right now: Schedule five conversations with potential customers this week. Use open-ended questions. Don’t pitch. Don’t lead. Just listen. If your problem surfaces organically in three or more conversations, you’re onto something real.
Signal 3: People Will Give You Their Email (or Better, Their Money)
Saying “I’d buy that” costs nothing. Typing in an email address costs a tiny bit of effort. Entering a credit card number costs real commitment. Each step up that ladder tells you more about actual demand.
This is why I’m a big advocate for running a pre-sale before building anything. Not because it’s a clever growth hack, but because it’s the most honest demand signal you can get.
When we launched our first product at Vulpine Creations, we didn’t build a full inventory and hope. We put up a description, a price, and a “notify me” option. The response told us exactly how much to produce. No guesswork. No wishful thinking.
You don’t need a finished product to test this. You need a clear description of what you’ll deliver, a price, and a way to collect commitments. If people won’t even give you an email address, they definitely won’t give you money later.
What to do right now: Create a simple landing page describing your solution and its price. Drive traffic to it from the communities where your target customers hang out. Track sign-ups for 72 hours. If you want a structured approach, here’s how to validate a business idea in 72 hours.
Signal 4: The Problem Has Frequency and Urgency
A problem that happens once a year won’t sustain a business unless the stakes are extremely high. A problem that happens daily, even if the stakes are low, creates habitual demand.
The best businesses sit at the intersection of frequency and urgency. The problem happens often, and people want it solved now.
Think about it: accounting software works because businesses deal with finances daily (frequency) and tax deadlines create pressure (urgency). A tool that helps you pick the perfect vacation destination? Low frequency, low urgency. That’s a hard business to build.
When I’m evaluating an idea, I ask two questions: How often does this problem occur? And what happens if the person doesn’t solve it today?
If the answer is “rarely” and “nothing much,” you’ve got an idea that might work as a nice-to-have but will struggle to generate consistent revenue. People buy painkillers, not vitamins — and they buy painkillers they need regularly.
What to do right now: Map out your problem on a 2x2 grid. X-axis: frequency (rare to daily). Y-axis: urgency (can wait to needs solving now). If your idea lands in the bottom-left quadrant, it doesn’t mean you should quit, but it means your unit economics need to compensate with high price points.
Signal 5: You Can Identify Exactly Where These People Gather
“Everyone needs this” is the most dangerous sentence in entrepreneurship. Even if your idea has broad appeal, you need to be able to point at a specific group of people and say: “They’re right there. I know how to reach them.”
Real demand exists in identifiable pockets. Freelance designers in European cities. Restaurant owners who use a specific POS system. Parents of kids with food allergies. The more specific you can get, the more testable your demand becomes.
If you can’t answer the question “Where do 1,000 potential customers hang out online or offline?” then you have a targeting problem that will make every other signal irrelevant. You might have real demand out there somewhere, but if you can’t find the people, you can’t serve them.
This is why one-channel mastery matters so much in the early days. You don’t need to be everywhere. You need to be in the one place where your most likely customers already are.
What to do right now: Write down three specific places (online communities, events, platforms, subreddits, Slack groups, local meetups) where your target customers actively discuss the problem your idea solves. If you can’t name three, you don’t know your market well enough yet.
The Anti-Signal: Enthusiasm Without Specificity
I want to flag the biggest false positive I see: broad enthusiasm from friends, family, and people who will never be your customer.
“That’s such a great idea!” from your cousin who works in an unrelated field means absolutely nothing. Neither does a LinkedIn post that gets lots of likes. Social validation and market validation are completely different things.
Real demand shows up in specific, measurable behaviors: people searching for solutions, people spending money on alternatives, people describing the problem unprompted, people willing to commit before you’ve built anything.
If all you have is “everyone I’ve told thinks it’s great,” you don’t have demand. You have encouragement. Those are not the same thing. The honest path forward is to stop waiting for more opinions and start running real tests with real potential customers.
Putting It All Together
Demand validation isn’t a one-time event. It’s an ongoing conversation with your market. But before you invest significant time or money, you should be able to check at least three of these five boxes:
- People are already paying for inferior solutions — money is flowing toward the problem, just not toward your solution yet.
- People describe the problem without prompting — the pain is real and top-of-mind, not theoretical.
- People will commit with their email or money — not just their words, but their actions show interest.
- The problem has frequency and urgency — it happens often enough and matters enough to drive repeat behavior.
- You can find these people in specific places — they’re identifiable and reachable, not a vague “everyone.”
If you’re hitting all five, you likely have genuine demand. Move fast. If you’re hitting one or two, you have a hypothesis worth testing further. If you’re hitting zero, you have an idea you like, not an idea the market wants.
The difference between the two is the difference between building a business and building a hobby that costs you money.
Takeaways
- Test for existing spending first. If nobody is currently paying to solve the problem — even with bad solutions — demand is likely imaginary.
- Listen before you pitch. If the problem doesn’t come up in unprompted conversations, you may be solving something people don’t actually care about.
- Get commitments, not compliments. Emails and pre-orders tell you more than a hundred “great idea” comments.
- Map frequency and urgency. Daily, urgent problems build businesses. Rare, low-stakes problems build features at best.
- Know exactly where your customers are. If you can’t point at a specific community or channel, your targeting is too vague to execute.
