🤑How a $1B brand nearly collapsed

Avoid the Common (and Costly) Startup Mistakes That Kim Kardashian Made

You have a million-dollar idea, or so you think.

Before you sink your savings, your sanity, or your weekends into building it, the smarter move is to validate it.

In 2020, Kim Kardashian launched a shapewear line called "Kimono." It flopped fast, not because it wasn’t backed by a billionaire brand. Because Kim ignored a critical element of business success: market research. The reaction wasn’t presales, it was a failure that prompted a trending hashtag, #KimOhNo.

Of course, Japanese citizens, cultural leaders, and international audiences were outraged by the name’s appropriation of the traditional garment. The backlash forced a full rebrand to what we now know as SKIMS, right after dumping millions of dollars down the drain.

You see, most ideas don’t fail because of poor execution.
They fail because there wasn’t market research for that particular service/product in the first place.

product prototypes developed with digital printing process

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Idea-First Thinking Leads to Expensive Failures

Most solopreneurs and new founders fall in love with an idea before they test whether the market even wants what they’re offering.

They build full product portfolios. They hire vendors. They launch.
And then…crickets.

It’s not just frustrating, it’s impractical because it’s not strategic.

We once had a client who wanted to do a multi-million dollar rebrand to change the company brand to match his daughter’s favorite color for her birthday. This wasn’t rooted in strategy, it was emotional and impulsive. It’s an extreme but I see these types of business decisions made by “gut-choices” and assumptions all the time.

Real-world examples:
** Quibi raised nearly $2 billion to launch a short-form streaming platform. But it skipped proper market testing, assuming consumers wanted mobile-only, short-form, high-budget shows. Within six months of launch, Quibi shut down.

** Juicero created a $400 Wi-Fi-connected juice press, assuming high-end consumers would flock to it. The kicker? You didn’t need the machine; the juice packets could be squeezed by hand. It failed after burning through $120 million.

**Pets.com spent aggressively on marketing and logistics without proving customer demand at scale. It launched in 1998 and collapsed in under two years, becoming a dot-com cautionary tale.

None of these failed due to a lack of effort,
they failed because they ignored one thing: customer truth.

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The Shift: From Creator's Mode to Customer Truth

Validating before building is about listening before speaking.
It’s a shift from: “What can I sell?” to “What problems are people willing to pay to have solved?”

Market research is the process of gathering truthful information about your ideal customers, their behaviors, preferences, needs, and how they make purchasing decisions. Without it, what you know is just an assumption.

While enterprise brands hire global firms, solopreneurs and startups can harness the power of micro focus groups, 5 to 15 carefully selected people from their target audience. Done right, these sessions uncover what customers really want before you invest time or money.

"42% of startups fail due to lack of market need."
CB Insights

The 5-Step Validation Process

You don’t need a pitch deck, a polished prototype, or even the best logo. You need proof that people want it and are willing to act.

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1. Start With Problem Interviews

Ask real people questions like:

• “What frustrates you most about [X]?”

• “What tools or solutions do you wish existed?”

• “Have you ever paid to fix that problem?”

Target: 10–15 real conversations
Goal: Capture specific words and emotional language. These become your future copy.
Tool: