How to Validate Your Problem by Finding the Workarounds Your Customers Already Use
Most founders validate their problem by asking people about it.
The answers feel encouraging. People nod. They say the problem is real. They say they would use something better. None of that is validation.
Validation is evidence that customers are already paying a cost to deal with the problem on their own. That cost has a name. It is the workaround. The most reliable signal of a real problem is not what people say about it. It is what they are already doing about it.
TL;DR: What People Say Is Not Validation. What They Already Do Is.
A workaround is anything a customer is currently doing to manage, avoid, or absorb a problem. Manual effort. Cobbled-together tools. Hiring a person. Paying for something inferior. Switching to a worse option. Or accepting the cost and doing nothing.
A workaround is observed behavior. It is harder to fake than an opinion in an interview, and it tells you more about urgency than any stated preference.
The strongest validation has three characteristics:
Costly: The customer is spending real time, money, or effort to maintain it Observed: It comes from behavior you watched or behavior the customer described in their own words, not from a hypothetical Specific to your segment: The people paying the cost are the people you are building for
Four signals indicate your problem validation is thinner than your conversations have suggested:
You can describe encouraging conversations but cannot name a specific behavior with a specific cost
The people who agreed the problem was real are not doing anything differently because of it
Your evidence comes from people who were asked, not from people who acted without being asked
You cannot name the most expensive thing a customer did in the last year to deal with this problem on their own
If any of those describe where you are, this article shows you how to inventory the workarounds, read what they tell you, and separate what you have validated from what you are still assuming.
If You Found This Article by Searching for Something Else
Most founders looking for help here are not searching for "workaround evidence." They are searching for something that feels more immediate.
How to validate a startup idea.
How to know if my problem is real.
How to do customer discovery.
How to tell if customers will pay.
How to validate a problem before building.
All of those searches point at the same underlying question. Is the problem urgent enough that someone is already paying to deal with it? This article shows you how to answer that with evidence instead of optimism.
Why Conversations Feel Like Validation and Are Not
People are agreeable. When a founder describes a problem with conviction, the polite response is agreement. The problem sounds reasonable. The idea sounds promising. The conversation ends on a high note.
That high note is the trap.
Agreement costs the customer nothing. It does not predict whether they will pay, switch, or change behavior to use what you build. A founder who mistakes agreement for validation can spend six months building before discovering the problem was never urgent enough to displace what people were already doing, or not doing.
The question that cuts through this is simple. What is the most expensive thing a customer has done in the last year to deal with this problem on their own? If you can name a specific behavior with a specific cost, you have a thread to pull. If you cannot, the validation is thinner than the conversations suggested.
What a Workaround Is, and Where to Find It
A workaround is any behavior a customer uses to cope with a problem they have not solved. The behavior is the evidence. The cost of the behavior is the strength of that evidence.
A founder building software to screen job candidates kept hearing the problem was real. Then one recruiter described her actual week. Every Friday she exports resumes into a spreadsheet and ranks them by hand. Four hours, every week. That ritual is the workaround. The spreadsheet is not the signal. The four hours every Friday is.
Workarounds show up in three places, and one of them is stronger than founders expect.
Direct observation or conversation. People you have watched or talked to about this problem. Useful, but carry the bias of being asked.
Secondary evidence in the customer's own language. Reddit threads, Amazon reviews, forum posts, app store complaints, support tickets, YouTube comments. Anywhere customers described the problem publicly, without being asked. This can be stronger than a primary interview, because it captures behavior and language that surfaced without prompting. Read it with care. These sources skew toward the loudest and least satisfied, so a hundred angry posts are not the same as a hundred ready buyers.
Industry or category signals. The tools, services, consultants, and hacks that exist specifically because this problem exists. When a category of imperfect solutions has emerged, that category is itself workaround evidence.
The work is to inventory what you can find and aim for at least three. The number is a triangulation check, not a magic threshold. One workaround can be idiosyncratic, the quirk of a single customer. The same behavior showing up across three separate sources is harder to dismiss. If you cannot get to three, the issue may not be your validation. It may be your discovery, and the next move is to go gather more before you build anything.
Not All Workarounds Carry the Same Weight
Workarounds are not equal. The type tells you what the customer is willing to do about the problem. The cost tells you how much pain they are absorbing. Together they are the diagnostic.
A customer running a daily spreadsheet by hand is voting with effort. A customer paying an agency every month is voting with money. A customer who duct-tapes three tools together is telling you the problem is worth a workflow. Those are strong signals.
A customer who has simply decided to live with the problem is telling you something different. Status quo acceptance can be widespread and still be weak. The problem is real, but the customer is not in active pain about it. A widespread shrug is not the same as a widespread cost.
Read the status quo before you score it weak. In some markets the customer is not shrugging. They are absorbing a cost they did not choose. A clinic filling out paper forms, a team following a process nobody likes, a compliance ritual that eats hours every month. That is an institutionalized workaround, entrenched enough to look like acceptance. The tell is whether the inertia is a choice or a constraint. A choice is a weak signal. A constraint that hurts is not.
So cost each workaround honestly. Hours per week. Dollars per month. Error rate or risk absorbed. Opportunity cost, the thing they cannot do because this problem keeps taking their attention. The most expensive workarounds are your strongest validation. They are also the ones most worth displacing.
Then ask the question founders skip. Are the most expensive workarounds being used by the segment you are targeting, or by a different group? Validation only counts for the people whose behavior you actually observed.
One distinction matters more than any of this, and it is the one founders skip most often. A workaround validates the problem. It does not validate your solution. A customer can be paying a real cost and still stay with the workaround, because switching to you carries its own cost: a new tool to learn, data to move, a habit to break, trust to extend. The workaround is proof the problem is worth solving. Whether it is worth solving your way is a separate question. You answer it by finding where the workaround breaks.
In a company, watch who is absorbing the cost. The person living the workaround is often not the person who controls the budget. The recruiter loses four hours every Friday. The finance lead who approves the purchase never sees those hours. A workaround can be acute for the user and invisible to the buyer, and the buyer is the one who signs. When you validate a problem inside an organization, validate the cost twice: for the person who feels it and for the person who pays to remove it.
Reading the Job the Workaround Points At
What a customer is doing reveals what they are trying to accomplish. And the workaround is almost always narrower than the stated problem. More specific. Closer to the actual job they are hiring something to do.
A customer does not maintain a reconciliation spreadsheet because they want "better finances." They maintain it to produce one specific output. A reconciled set of numbers they can trust before a deadline. That output is the job. Your solution competes against the spreadsheet at the exact moment the spreadsheet is being used, not against "bad financial processes" in the abstract.
Two questions sharpen this.
What specific outcome is the customer producing when they use the workaround? Not "solving the problem." The actual output. A scheduled meeting. A document they can send. A diagnosis they trust.
And where does the workaround break down? That breakdown is the wedge. Your solution has to be better at the specific moment the workaround fails, not better in general. If you cannot name where the current behavior breaks, you do not yet know where you win.
The Honest Read: Four Patterns
Workaround evidence tells you what is real. The honest read is the one that separates what you have validated from what you are still assuming. Most evidence falls into one of four patterns.
Strong workarounds across multiple sources and segments. Customers are spending real time, money, or effort, and they are doing it across groups. The problem is validated as urgent. The next move is to confirm your solution displaces the specific workaround for a specific segment.
Strong workarounds in a narrow segment only. The problem is real, but only for a specific group. The next move is to verify whether that group is your target market, or whether you have been describing the problem too broadly.
Weak workarounds or status quo acceptance. Customers acknowledge the problem but pay little to address it. The problem is real and not urgent. The next move is to find a more acute version of it, or a segment that feels it more sharply.
No observable workarounds. No one is doing anything about it. Either the problem is not active enough to require solving, or you have not yet found the right people, or the better option is one customers cannot yet picture, so they tolerate the status quo without naming it as a problem. The next move is more discovery, not more building.
The temptation is to claim the first pattern when the evidence is closer to the third. Resist it. The pattern you actually have determines the move you should actually make.
The One Sentence That Tells You Where You Stand
A founder who has done this work can complete one sentence with specifics:
I have validated that this specific group is currently paying this specific cost to deal with this specific problem, which means my next move is this specific action.
A founder who is still assuming will reach for general words. "People struggle with this." "Everyone I talk to wants this." The vagueness is the diagnosis. Specific and observed beats broad and encouraging every time.
If you can fill that sentence with a real segment, a real cost, and a real next move, your problem is validated and you know where to push. If you cannot, you have not found the validation yet. You have found a more specific question to answer. Either outcome moves you forward.
Workarounds and Your Problem Clarity
In the Startup Readiness Framework, Problem Clarity evaluates whether a founder has moved beyond believing a problem is real to proving it with evidence. Thin or missing problem validation is one of the most common flags in early assessments. Not because founders are not talking to people, but because the conversations produced agreement rather than evidence of cost.
A founder who can describe an encouraging conversation has demonstrated interest. A founder who can name a specific segment paying a specific cost to deal with the problem on their own has demonstrated validation.
If your Problem Clarity flagged thin validation, start here. Inventory the workarounds. Cost them honestly. Read the job they point at. Name the pattern your evidence actually fits. Workarounds are the strongest evidence you can collect short of a customer paying you.
Problem Clarity is one of the six pillars in the Startup Readiness Framework. If your problem is validated, the next question is whether the rest of your startup is as ready as your evidence.
The Startup Readiness Assessment gives you a full-system diagnostic across all six pillars in under twenty minutes.
Take your Startup Readiness Score free today at startupreadinessscore.com →
Published
By Dr. Shaun P. Digan
Original Publication Date: June 2, 2026
Last Updated: June 2, 2026
About the Author
Dr. Shaun P. Digan is the founder of Startup.Ready and the creator of the Startup Readiness Framework, a research-based system for evaluating and validating early-stage startups before launch and early growth. He holds a PhD in Entrepreneurship from the University of Louisville and has spent over 15 years teaching, advising, and consulting with founders on startup strategy, validation, and growth.
In his writing, including The Foundations of Innovation, he focuses on how founders can make better decisions by improving clarity, alignment, and readiness before scaling.