Start Validating a New Business in the Field, Not at Your Desk

When I had to find a new application market for Vision AI technology, I planned a smart-glasses-based AI solution targeting the incident investigation process in firefighting and industrial safety. The project led to an entry strategy for a domestic market worth about KRW 30 billion and a 3rd-round PoC pilot with a public enterprise. Its starting point, though, was not a market report but interviews with active-duty firefighters.

One hour of interviews beats two months of research

Spend two months researching at your desk and you get a plausible picture of market size, the competitive landscape, even technology trends. But that picture is missing something critical: where real users struggle, and why. One hour of in-depth interviews with active-duty firefighters showed me, at a resolution no document could offer, that incident investigation ran mainly on handwritten notes and verbal handoffs, which limited both accuracy and speed.

Pain points are discovered, not guessed

A common trap for planners is mistaking a guess like "this technology could solve that problem" for a pain point. The order has to be reversed: discover the problem in the field first, then put together the combination of technologies that can solve it. The combination of smart glasses, wearables, and Vision AI did not come from a technology catalog. It was worked out backward from what the field required: "Hands must stay free, and the scene must be recorded."

Write the user flow in the field's own language

When you turn what you learned in interviews into a user flow, keep the field's terminology and sequence intact. Design the flow around the order in which users actually move — dispatch, entry, recording, return, reporting — and when you later bring the solution concept back to the field, the reaction is "This is about us." This is how we validated customer needs and the user flow, and that validation laid the groundwork for the entry strategy and the PoC that followed.

Market sizing comes after validation

TAM/SAM/SOM estimates and competitor analysis are, of course, necessary. But they come only after field validation has confirmed what the problem actually is. Once you are confident the problem is real, market sizing becomes a tool for sharpening the entry strategy. Without that validation, a market estimate, however detailed, is just a hypothesis built on a hypothesis.

Closing thoughts

A new business that involves hardware cannot be worked out at a desk without field interviews. The insight real users give you in one hour beats two months of research. The first item on a new-business validation schedule should be a field visit, not report writing.