Your Startup Idea Isn't Unvalidated. It's Untested. There's a Difference.

You've heard the advice a thousand times. "Validate your idea before you build." You nodded. You believed it. You maybe even did it — posted in a subreddit, ran a Twitter poll, got 200 waitlist signups, asked five friends who said "honestly yeah, I'd use that." And then you built it anyway. And it died anyway. Here's what nobody says out loud: you did validate. That's exactly the problem. Validation Is Broken. Nobody's Saying It. The word "validation" has been so thoroughly destroyed by startup