Quickly validate if your idea is worth anything | Starter Story

When Pat Walls, founder of Starter Story, needed to figure out whether a business idea had real demand, he didn't run a survey or build a landing page. He opened Google Trends and a Chrome extension called Keyword Everywhere. The goal wasn't to prove his idea was good—it was to find out if people were already searching for what he wanted to sell.

Walls argues that most aspiring founders skip the most important step: validating that a market actually exists before they build anything. The conversation walks through a concrete, low-cost process for doing exactly that, grounded in search behavior rather than gut feeling.

Search volume as a demand signal

The core mechanism Walls uses is simple: if people type something into Google, they want it. If they type it thousands of times a month, the demand is real. He starts with Keyword Everywhere, a browser extension that shows monthly search volume for any query. The trick is to look not just at the obvious keyword but at the long tail of related terms.