One of the biggest mistakes I see early founders make?

Thinking that getting investment validates their idea.

It doesn’t. Consistent REVENUE does.

Funding is a tool, not a strategy.

Capital won’t fix a weak value proposition, poor positioning, or lack of demand.

Here’s the hard truth for early stage founders:

🚫 You don’t need investment to pay yourself a salary.
Salaries come from revenue, not venture capital. If you’re not making sales, it’s time to fund your own runway—whether that’s a 9-5 job, savings, or support from a partner/family.

🚫 You don’t need a big investment to pay developers.
Building MVPs has never been cheaper. AI, third-party tools, no-code, and low-code solutions let you build an MVP faster and at a fraction of the cost.

But let’s be real—You Will Invest Something.

Maybe it’s time.  Maybe it’s money—not millions, but something.

The good news? It doesn’t have to be a lot.

So how do you avoid wasting time and money?

👉🏻 Find demand before you build.

Most founders fall in love with their idea and hope customers will follow.

The smart ones? They find customers first and build around real demand—they let customers pull them forward.

How do you find demand?

💡 Understand why buyers need to change.
People don’t buy products—they buy outcomes. If your customer is willing to switch from the status quo, there’s a reason. Your job is to figure out what that reason is.

💡 Figure out what they need to achieve.
What is the ultimate goal your ideal customer is trying to reach? What drives them? What’s standing in their way? If your product helps them remove that barrier, you’re onto something.

Demand isn’t found in a whiteboard session. It isn’t in your pitch deck.It isn’t in your investor emails.It’s found in real human action. 

And the best way to test demand?

👉🏻 Sell before you build

Here’s how TechSpeak student Alex Found Demand (Before Building a Product).

Instead of wasting months building, he did something different:

✅ Did focused validation to discover what outcomes his customers would actually pay for (with money and time).

✅ Built a clickable prototype—just enough to show potential customers and further remove the guesswork.

✅ Pre-sold his B2B marketing solution before writing a single line of code.

✅ Got 7 letters of intent.

✅ And here’s the kicker—2 of them PAID for a simple Excel version of the product.

This is how you de-risk your startup and make sure customers are waiting.

This also gave him even more confidence to continue to invest both time and money into building the “more expensive” version of the product.

✍️ Think about your current situation. What’s one step you’ll take this week to validate demand?