Pressure-test products hands-on against competitors before committing
Install your product and competitors products in a real production environment. Break things deliberately. Test whether solutions actually work. This hands-on validation builds deep conviction about whether you can win and should be worth years of effort.
When to use
When evaluating whether to join a company, pivot to a new market, or validate product-market fit before scaling. Especially important for infrastructure and data products where claims are easy but execution is hard.
Don't do this
Relying on demos, customer testimonials, or surface-level feature comparisons without personally verifying the solution works under real conditions. Trusting claims without hands-on testing.
1 Founder Who Did This
Installed Own and competitors on his family business Salesforce instance, deliberately deleted data, and tested whether each could actually recover it. Validated the market was huge (250K+ Salesforce customers), problem was real (friend had lost data), solution worked (verified through testing), and could build a company (not just a product).