In Adii Pienaar’s recent post about intuition, The Greatest Hits Are Obvious, he states:
Great ideas remain great ideas. And the greatest ideas are obviously great at first sight.
I can’t say I agree.
Was Twitter, Instagram, or Uber obvious? Unless you have God-like intuition, most of the greatest ideas are not obvious at first.
However, he makes a valid argument for relying on intuition, or at the very least, not ignoring it. Some of the best ideas would have been killed early if its founders relied entirely on the external validation techniques Adii describes (customer development, data analysis, product/market-fit, the size of the market/opportunity).
Startups are born from a hunch before validation and traction. Don’t ignore your intuition.