The Super-Chicken Trap: Why Strong Signals Don’t Always Mean a Strong System
A founder recently told me their beta users “loved” the product — glowing comments, five-star reactions, one enthusiastic superfan who wouldn’t stop talking about it. Six months later, almost none of those people paid for it. Nothing about the individual signals was fake. The mistake was assuming that a handful of strong local signals summed up to a strong global truth. That gap — between what looks like proof and what actually is proof — is where most validation goes wrong, and a decades-old chicken experiment explains why better than most startup advice does.