Most founders validate backwards.
Build for six months, launch, hear crickets. Then ask if anyone wanted it.
Manoj Sakunthalan did the opposite with Infography, a tool that turns blog posts into infographics. He used waitlist validation: a landing page and one Reddit post. 1,400 people visited. Over 150 joined the waitlist. Some of them pre-ordered a product that did not exist yet.
Only then did he start building.
That app has now done $94,000 in the last 12 months. Solo founder from Madurai, India, zero funding.
I found his story on the Starter Story Build channel and it's one of the cleanest validation case studies I've seen. Watch the breakdown, then steal the playbook below.
The idea found him mid-struggle
Manoj was not looking for a startup idea. He was trying to save a different product.
He started his career as a manual tester, spent years at Zoho, then left to build his own thing. (Zoho is a pretty good school for bootstrappers: profitable, no VC, built from India.)
His first product was going nowhere. Not because the product was bad. Because the marketing was. Nobody clicked, nobody read, nobody signed up.
So he made an infographic to promote it. That one infographic outperformed everything else he had tried.
And making it had been painful. He had the blog post already, but turning it into a visual ate hours. If it hurt him, it hurt thousands of content teams too.
He shelved the original product and built the painkiller instead: blog post in, infographic out. That was early 2024.
→ You don't find ideas scrolling idea listicles. You find them by building something, hitting a wall, and noticing the wall is the actual business.
The Reddit post that validated it in 24 hours
This is where most of us open Cursor and disappear for three months. (I've done it. Twice.)
Manoj opened Reddit.
He put up a simple waitlist page. Headline, a few lines on what the tool would do, an email field. Then he posted it in r/startup_ideas with a title so direct it almost hurts: "Is this product worth building?"
No demo, no product screenshots, just the pitch and a link.
24 hours later:
- 1,400 page views
- 150+ waitlist signups
- a comment thread full of people describing what they would pay for
Then came the move that separates interest from intent. He added a pre-order option to the waitlist page. And people bought. An app that was zero percent built collected real money.
Gus from Starter Story frames it well in the video: there's interest validation (people click) and monetary validation (people pay). Compliments are free. Pre-orders are proof.
I paid attention to this one because I see the opposite constantly. Founders DM me "I got 300 upvotes, should I quit my job?" Upvotes are not revenue. Manoj had revenue before he had a product.
And the cost of running this test was a landing page and a Reddit post. Compare that to the usual path: three months of nights and weekends, a launch tweet, 11 likes, and a quiet funeral for the repo.
Under the hood it's an AI wrapper (and that's fine)
So what is Infography technically?
An AI wrapper. LLM API calls inside a web app, with prompting tuned to produce clean infographics, plus templates, saving, and bulk generation.
You could dump a blog post into ChatGPT right now and ask for an infographic. You would get something decent. Infography is simply better at that one job, and the one job is what people pay for.
Wrappers get sneered at on X every week. The $94,000 disagrees. I broke this down in are AI wrappers a good business: the API call was never the moat. The workflow and the distribution are.
And because Manoj validated before building, he knew the wrapper was worth writing. That is the part everyone skips.
How Infography grew to $94K a year
Validation got him to launch. Three channels carried it from launch to $40,000 in the first 5 months, then $94,000 over the last 12:
1. Product Hunt, more than once. The launch pulled 634 upvotes and a long comment thread. Then V2 got its own launch. Then V3. Every meaningful update became a fresh shot at the front page instead of a changelog nobody reads.
2. Affiliates. There's a "become an affiliate" link on the site. Creators promote the tool, they take a cut of every sale. Zero upfront cost, pay only on results.
3. Lifetime deals. He partnered with a lifetime-deal platform and sold one-time-price access in bulk. LTD buyers are a mixed blessing (you support them forever), but as a cash infusion for a bootstrapped solo founder, it works.
None of this is secret growth hacking. It is distribution basics, actually executed.
Notice what's missing: paid ads, a sales team, content calendars, a growth hire. One person and three channels, repeated for two years.
Why most waitlists tell you nothing
Before you copy the playbook, know where it goes wrong. I see three failure modes over and over.
The audience is your friends. You post the page in your group chat and on your personal LinkedIn. 40 signups, all people who like you. Zero of them have the problem. Manoj posted to strangers in a subreddit about startup ideas, people with no reason to be polite.
There is no price anywhere. A waitlist without a pre-order option only measures curiosity. Curiosity is worth nothing at the bank. The pre-order button is the entire experiment, the rest is decoration.
You measure the wrong moment. Launch-day spikes flatter you. The number that matters is week two: do people reply to your build updates, do they answer when you ask about their workflow, does anyone email you asking when it ships? Dead lists go quiet immediately. Live ones talk back.
Run the test against strangers, with a price, measured past the spike. If it still works, build.
The waitlist validation playbook
Steal this. It costs almost nothing and takes one weekend.
Step 1: Write the one-sentence pitch. "X turns your blog posts into infographics." If you need a paragraph to explain it, you're not ready to validate it.
Step 2: Ship the waitlist page in 2 hours. Headline, three bullets on what it does, email field. Carrd or Framer is plenty, and ugly is fine as long as it ships this weekend.
Step 3: Post where your buyers already hang out. For Manoj that was subreddits. For you it might be a Slack community, X, or a Facebook group. Use a direct title and ask the honest question: is this worth building?
Step 4: Add a pre-order button once signups come in. This is the whole test. A discounted lifetime or first-year price, refundable if you never ship. A yes in a comment thread costs nothing. A pre-order costs real money, which is why it's the only answer you can trust.
Step 5: Nurture the list while you build. 150 signups go cold in a month if you ghost them. Send a short build update every week. Decent lead nurturing strategies are what turn a curious signup into a day-one customer.
My kill threshold: if you can't get 100 signups or a single pre-order after posting in 3 or 4 real communities, the idea is either wrong or positioned wrong. Fix the pitch or move on. I wrote a longer framework in how to validate a SaaS idea if you want to go deeper.
FAQ
What is waitlist validation?
Waitlist validation means testing demand for a product with a signup page before you build anything. You publish a landing page describing the product, drive traffic from communities where your buyers hang out, and measure signups and pre-orders. Manoj validated Infography this way: 1,400 visits and 150+ signups in 24 hours, plus paid pre-orders, before writing code.
How many waitlist signups do you need to validate an idea?
There's no magic number, but 100+ signups from a few community posts is a real signal. The stronger signal is money: a handful of pre-orders beats a thousand passive emails. Manoj got 150 signups in a day, and the pre-orders were what proved Infography deserved to exist.
How do you get people to join a waitlist?
Go where your buyers already are and ask directly. Manoj posted "Is this product worth building?" in r/startup_ideas with a link. He didn't run ads or chase influencers. If your pitch names a painful problem, communities respond. If it does not, no traffic source will save it.
Do pre-orders actually work before a product exists?
Yes, if you de-risk them. Offer a discounted lifetime or first-year price and promise a refund if you never ship. Buyers get a deal, you get the only validation signal that can't lie. Kickstarter built an industry on this exact mechanic.
Hear more stories like this
Manoj went from manual tester to $94K a year with one Reddit post and a weekend landing page.
Every week on the Profitable Founder Podcast I sit down with bootstrapped SaaS founders doing $100K to $10M a year and pull out exactly how they did it. Real numbers and the exact decisions behind them.
