Quickly validate if your idea is worth anything | Starter Story

When Pat Walls, the founder of Starter Story, sits down to evaluate whether a business idea has any real potential, he doesn't rely on gut feelings or expensive market research firms. Instead, he uses a free tool that anyone can access: Google Trends. But the key insight from his conversation is not just which tool to use—it's how to interpret what the data is actually telling you, and more importantly, what it's not telling you.

Walls explains that most aspiring entrepreneurs make the same mistake: they fall in love with an idea and then look for data that confirms their bias. The smarter approach is to start with the data and let it guide you toward an opportunity, not the other way around. He walks through a systematic process for validating demand before you build anything.

The keyword-first approach to market research

The validation process begins not with a business plan, but with a Google Chrome extension called Keyword Everywhere. Walls uses it to search for related keywords around a broad topic and see the monthly search volume for each one. The goal is to find a sub-niche within a larger market that has enough search volume to indicate real demand, but not so much competition that you'll be invisible.