Day one
Choose the risk
Name the customer, the painful moment and the assumption most likely to kill the idea.
Before day one
Define what would change your mind
Write the belief underneath the idea. It might be that independent recruiters lose enough time to pay for a faster workflow, or that first time managers will book help before a difficult conversation.
Then decide what evidence would weaken that belief. This matters because founders are very good at turning every response into encouragement once they want an idea to work.
Choose one narrow customer group for the test. You can expand later. A broad audience makes every conversation polite and almost none of them useful.
Day two
Hear the language
Speak to relevant people about what they do now. Do not pitch until you understand the behaviour.
Day three
Make the test
Create the smallest credible experience that can answer the risky question.
Day four
Put it in front of people
Watch people use it, notice confusion and resist explaining every rough edge.
Day five
Make the offer
Name the outcome, the price and the next step. Ask for a commitment that costs something.
Day six
Follow the evidence
Fix the obstacle that blocked genuine interest. Do not rebuild everything after one opinion.
Day seven
Decide
Continue, change direction or stop. Write down what the evidence supports and what remains unknown.
Good evidence
Commitment has a cost
A compliment costs nothing. A useful signal requires the other person to give up money, time, reputation, data or access to a real workflow.
Strong early signals include a paid pilot, a deposit, an introduction to the decision maker, permission to test inside a real team or repeated use without reminders.
A waiting list can help compare messages, but it is weak evidence of demand unless joining it requires a meaningful action. Thousands of email addresses can still conceal zero customers.
Bad evidence
Do not count the room agreeing
Friends saying they love it, survey respondents predicting future behaviour and online communities debating the concept can all feel productive. None proves that the customer will change what they do.
Avoid asking whether somebody would use the product. Ask about the last time the problem happened, what they tried, what it cost and who else was involved. Past behaviour is not perfect, but it is usually more reliable than imagined enthusiasm.
Do not change direction after every conversation. Look for repeated patterns among people with the same problem and enough reason to solve it.
The result
A clear no is useful
Seven days may produce a customer. It may also reveal that the problem is occasional, the buyer is different from the user or the proposed solution creates more work than it removes.
That is not a failed week. It is information that arrived before months of engineering, branding and fundraising were built around the wrong thing.
Finish by recording what happened, what changed and the next smallest test. Validation is not a certificate. It is a habit of reducing uncertainty through contact with reality.
Seven days. One honest answer.
Camp 01 combines this validation rhythm with founder workshops, a central workspace and enough distance from ordinary life to finish the test.