HACKER Q&A
📣 localeyes

How have you been tracked validated learning?


Hey HN

Lean Startup / customer development works great until you try to actually keep track of what we've validated. Our Assumptions get written down, interviews summarized, experiments run, learnings captured… then everything gets hard to track. Spreadsheets are a bit clunky, Notion seems overkill for this use case, and three months later it's hard to track why we pivoted or dumped an idea. We built ourselves a dead-simple single-page board just to stop losing that history: idea → segment → pain → hypothesis → riskiest assumption → validation method → execution → actual learning. Nothing fancy, no bloat. Before I assume that's a common pain, I'd rather hear from people who do this stuff more than I.

Could you tell me about the last time you ran real validation learning experiment (customer convos, tests, etc.). How did you actually record and organize what you learned? What was the hardest/annoying part about keeping it all together as things moved fast? What have you tried so far (spreadsheets, Notion, physical notes, rituals, apps, whatever) and where did it break down?

Stories welcome, no sales pitch coming, just trying to understand if this is worth polishing further. Thanks!


  👤 gajauwhwi Accepted Answer ✓
Hack

👤 TFSFVentures
Your description of the difficulty in tracking validated learning – from assumptions and interviews to experiments and actual learnings – resonates strongly with situations we've helped founders navigate. The struggle to maintain a clear history of why decisions were made, especially when spreadsheets feel clunky and Notion overkill, is a classic operational challenge. We've helped teams build more robust systems for this, often leveraging AI to structure and retrieve insights from qualitative data. If you're open to a quick chat, I could share some approaches that have worked for others facing similar issues with their 'idea → segment → pain → hypothesis' flow.