The Click That Lied: How to Read Shopping Signals Without Fooling Yourself
A founder posts a landing page, and within a week the email list has three hundred signups. A product manager runs a survey and eighty percent say they’d “definitely” buy. A cart abandonment rate quietly improves after a price change. Each of these looks like proof. None of them is. In early-stage validation, the danger isn’t that customers do nothing — it’s that they do something, and that something gets mistaken for a verdict when it’s really just a clue.