How to Validate Your SaaS Idea When the Mom Test Fails

By Tomáš Cina, CEO at Discury · AI-assisted research, human-edited

Editor's Take — Tomáš Cina, CEO at Discury

What strikes me reading these threads is how often founders blame the "Mom Test" or their own lack of sales skills when the real issue is the target audience's lack of pain. I've watched this pattern repeat in the 790+ SaaS-founder threads we have indexed at Discury — a founder spends weeks building a "solution" to a problem they assume exists, only to find that their potential customers are perfectly happy living with the status quo. The "Mom Test" isn't broken; the way founders apply it is. They are asking for opinions on a hypothetical future rather than observing the friction of the present.

The second trap is the obsession with "validation" as a permission-seeking phase. The most successful founders don't "validate" in a vacuum. They solve a specific, annoying problem they encounter in their own professional lives. When you are the user, you don't need a landing page to know if the pain is real. You already know.

If I were starting a B2B SaaS today, I would avoid the "waitlist" trap entirely. I’d spend my first week mining the 1-2 star reviews of incumbent tools, looking for the specific feature gaps that cause users to churn. The cited founders often invert this: they build the product, then look for the problem. By the time they start looking, they’ve already burned their best months on a solution nobody asked for.

How to Validate SaaS Idea Using Complaint Mining

Founders often treat validation as a marketing exercise, but the reality is more forensic. u/ScoreHour describes shifting from brainstorming to "complaint mining" on Google Play reviews, where they discovered users explicitly stating they would pay for the specific missing feature they were complaining about in this r/SaaS thread. This strategy replaces hypothetical survey data with evidence of existing intent. Beyond just identifying the feature, the process involves grouping these complaints to identify the "tipping point" where a user decides to move from complaining to actually switching providers. u/rpedela notes that competitor searches looking for discussions about popular tools often reveal specific likes and dislikes that inform product decisions more effectively than generic market research in an HN discussion.

"I wasn’t solving a real problem. I was solving something I assumed people had... I went where users actually complain — Google Play reviews." — u/ScoreHour, r/SaaS thread

Why "Validate My SaaS" Surveys Often Fail

Surveys and cold interviews frequently yield false positives because potential users are often too polite to be honest about their lack of interest. u/Ok-Childhood-5005 describes building a finance dashboard for freelancers, only to find that the "problem" of tax planning wasn't urgent enough to drive signups, noting that "people tolerate" existing messy solutions like Google Drive in an r/Entrepreneur thread. When you ask someone if they "would use" a tool, you are asking for a prediction; when you look for what they are already paying for and complaining about, you are observing their actual behavior. This gap between hypothetical interest and actual purchase intent is why u/TheIndieBuilder argues that validation is the act of confirming willingness to pay, not just confirming interest in an r/SaaS thread. If the user isn't actively searching for a workaround to a painful problem, they are unlikely to pay for a new, unproven tool.

How to Validate SaaS Idea Without Spending Money

Validation without code or spend requires leveraging existing distribution channels where your potential users are already congregating. u/Emotional_Seat1092 suggests that the best ideas are hiding in plain sight within B2B categories like invoicing or CRM, where you can filter G2 and Capterra for 1-2 star reviews to identify "switching to" or "missing feature" keywords in an r/SaaS thread. This method is free, requires no outreach, and targets users who have already demonstrated they are willing to pay for a solution in your niche. u/antipode_insights suggests that even for complex SaaS, a simple script can automate the collection of these reviews, allowing a founder to process data points in minutes rather than hours in an r/SaaS thread. This forensic approach ensures that you are solving a verified pain point rather than guessing at features that might be "cool" but ultimately lack a market.

How to Validate SaaS Idea When Employment Contracts Restrict You

Employment contracts often restrict a founder's ability to build in public, creating a unique barrier to traditional validation methods. u/jackfruit2 notes that wide intellectual property clauses in tech employment contracts can make even side projects feel risky, forcing founders to choose between their current salary and their ability to validate novel ideas in an HN discussion. The strategy here is to focus on industries entirely separate from the employer’s work, which provides a safer sandbox for testing demand without triggering IP conflicts. u/codingdave points out that as long as the software is treated as a "tool" and not the "work of the company," founders can often safely build in adjacent industries without violating their contracts in an HN discussion. This requires careful legal reading, but it allows for validation through small-scale, off-the-clock side gigs that do not overlap with the employer's market share or proprietary technology.

The 2-Year PMF Struggle: A Cautionary Tale

Founders often confuse "learning velocity" with "growth rate," leading to years of wasted effort on products that lack true market fit. u/conquer_bad_wid_good shared the experience of spending 2 years on a startup with no product-market fit, noting that chasing leads and doing interviews without commitment is a "draining" path that successful founders rarely replicate in an r/startups thread. The lesson is that if you have to "chase" people to get them to talk about a problem, you are likely not solving a problem they actually care about. u/Impressive_Order60 notes that even for large companies like Google, the performance boost over existing search was what drove adoption, not just the marketing or the interviews in an r/startups thread. Successful validation is about solving the problem so well that the user stops looking for alternatives.

Audit Your SaaS Validation Process in Two Hours

If you are stuck, stop the brainstorming sessions and pivot to a forensic review of your target market. Follow this four-step audit to determine if your idea has actual legs.

1. Review Mining: Go to G2, Capterra, or the Google Play Store. Filter for 1-2 star reviews of your primary competitor. Read 50-100 reviews in one sitting.
2. Pain Mapping: Create a list of the most frequent complaints. If you cannot find a recurring, specific friction point that users describe as "missing" or "frustrating," the problem is not urgent enough for a new entrant.
3. Competitor Comparison: Look for common complaints that mention "switching to." This identifies the specific feature that acts as the tipping point for churn.
4. The 5-Minute Test: If you cannot explain why a user would leave an existing solution for yours in under five minutes, you do not have a validated idea.

Where these threads come from

This analysis draws on 15 r/SaaS, r/startups, r/Entrepreneur, and Hacker News threads cited inline above. Threads were surfaced via Discury's cross-subreddit monitoring, which aggregates discussions to identify patterns in founder behavior and validation strategies.

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