How to Validate Your Consulting Offer Before You Build It

By Curt Roese, Published February 24, 2026

You spent three months building the perfect consulting package. The pricing is dialed in. The messaging is polished. You launch and nobody buys.

This scenario plays out constantly for experienced professionals entering the consulting and coaching world. The problem rarely comes down to marketing. Most failed launches are listening problems. Before you invest another hour building your offer, you need to validate that people actually want what you're creating.

Learning how to validate a consulting offer before you build it is the single most important skill a 55+ professional can develop in their first year. According to CB Insights, 42% of startups fail because there is no market need for their product or service. That number isn't about bad marketing. It's about assumptions that were never tested.

This post walks through the validation process step by step: why experienced professionals are uniquely vulnerable to building the wrong thing, how to run simple customer discovery conversations, and how to turn what you hear into an offer people actually want to buy.

The Expert's Curse: Why Experience Creates Blind Spots

Three decades of expertise is your greatest asset. It's also your biggest liability when it comes to building a new offer.

The deeper your knowledge, the harder it is to remember what it felt like not to know it. Behavioral economists call this the "curse of knowledge." Once you understand something at a deep level, you can't fully reconstruct the confusion that existed before you learned it.

For experienced professionals, this shows up in a specific and costly way. You assume your audience wants advanced strategies when they're stuck on basics. You build solutions for problems you wish you'd had earlier in your career instead of the problems your audience is actually facing right now.

The 10-Second Answer Problem

Consider this: the question you can answer in 10 seconds took you 10 years to learn. That gap is exactly where miscommunication happens between experienced professionals and their target market.

Your pattern recognition is the asset. But packaging it at your level instead of your audience's level is one of the most common and expensive mistakes consultants and coaches make in year one.

• What feels "too simple" to teach is often exactly what people need
• Your audience doesn't want complexity, they want clarity
• The goal is to meet them where they are, not where you wish they were

The solution isn't to dumb things down. It's to listen before you build.

Why Validation Is Not the Same as Market Research

Most professionals who skip validation don't think they're skipping it. They think they've already done their research. They've read industry reports. They've looked at what competitors offer. They've thought carefully about their own experience and what they'd want if they were starting over.

That's market research. Validation is different.

Market research tells you what the broad picture looks like. Validation tells you whether the specific people you want to serve will pay for the specific thing you're building. One is passive. The other is a direct conversation.

According to Harvard Business Review, companies that engage customers during product development are 60% more likely to achieve product-market fit. That finding applies directly to solo consulting and coaching businesses. The professionals who validate before they build don't just launch more successfully. They launch faster, because they're not rebuilding after a failed first attempt.

The Cost of Skipping This Step

Imagine spending three months developing a course on advanced financial modeling, only to discover your audience needs help with basic pricing strategy. That's not a hypothetical. It's the pattern that plays out when experienced professionals build from assumption rather than evidence.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that 25% of new businesses fail within the first year, with poor market research cited as a primary contributing factor. For professionals 55+ who are building second-act businesses with real financial stakes, that number isn't abstract. Validation isn't a startup buzzword. It's capital preservation.

How to Run a Simple Validation Process

Validation doesn't require a research firm or a large audience. It requires 10 conversations with the right people.

The goal of each conversation is simple: understand what your potential clients are actually struggling with, in their own words. Not what you think they're struggling with. Not what the industry reports say. What they tell you directly.

Here's the process:

• Identify 10 people from your existing professional network who match your target client profile
• Ask for 15 minutes of their time, framed as input on a project you're developing
• Ask two core questions: "What's your biggest obstacle right now?" and "What have you already tried?"
• Document their exact language, not your interpretation of it

That last point matters more than most people realize.

Why Their Words Become Your Offer Language

The phrases your potential clients use to describe their problems are the same phrases they'll search for online and respond to in your marketing. When you use their language instead of your own, your offer immediately feels more relevant.

This is not manipulation. It's clarity. You're reflecting back to people exactly what they've told you they need, packaged in a form that actually serves them.

Ten conversations prevent ten wasted weeks. A 15-minute conversation is free, and it's the best research and development investment you'll make in your first year of business.

Customer Discovery Interviews vs. Surveys: When to Use Each

Both tools serve the validation process. They serve different purposes and work best at different stages.

Customer discovery interviews are one-on-one conversations. They give you depth, nuance, and the ability to follow unexpected threads. When someone says something surprising, you can ask a follow-up question. Interviews are best early in the process, when you're still trying to understand the shape of the problem.

Surveys are better once you have a hypothesis. If your interviews reveal that pricing anxiety is the dominant challenge, a survey can help you quantify how widespread that challenge is across a larger group. Surveys give you breadth. Interviews give you insight.

How to Structure a Validation Interview

Keep the structure simple. Five questions are enough:

• What are you working on right now in your business or career transition?
• What's the biggest obstacle slowing you down?
• What have you already tried to address it?
• What would a solution need to look like to actually work for you?
• Who else do you know who's dealing with this same challenge?

That last question serves two purposes. It validates whether the problem is common, and it often leads to your next interview.

How to Find the Right People to Interview

For professionals 55+ building second-act businesses, the validation audience is closer than it feels. You don't need a large following or an email list to run meaningful customer discovery.

Your first 10 conversations can come from:

• Former colleagues who have left corporate roles in the past two to five years
• Professional associations in your industry or functional area
• LinkedIn connections who match your target client profile
• Alumni networks from universities or executive programs
• People in your existing personal network who are navigating similar transitions

Adults 50+ start 25% of all new businesses in the U.S., contributing $1.2 trillion in GDP annually, according to AARP and the Small Business Administration. Finding 10 people to talk to is a logistics problem, not a research problem.

What to Say When You Reach Out

Keep the ask simple and honest. Something like: "I'm developing resources for professionals transitioning out of corporate roles and I'd value 15 minutes of your perspective. No pitch, just questions." Most people say yes to that request, especially when it comes from a trusted professional contact.

Turning Validation Into an Offer

After 10 conversations, patterns will emerge. You'll hear the same phrases repeated. The same obstacles will surface across multiple people. The same attempted solutions will come up again and again.

Those patterns are your offer.

The problems people describe most frequently are the problems worth solving. The language they use to describe those problems is the language your offer should use. The solutions they've already tried and found inadequate tell you exactly what gaps your offer needs to fill.

From Validation to First Client

The transition from validation to first client is shorter than most people expect. In many cases, the person who gives you the most useful feedback in a discovery conversation becomes your first paying client. They've already told you their problem. You've demonstrated that you understand it. The next step is a natural one.

Building from validated problems rather than assumptions doesn't just improve your launch odds. It shortens the time between starting and earning.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I validate a consulting offer before I invest time building it?

Start with 10 one-on-one conversations with people who match your target client profile. Ask what they're struggling with and what they've already tried. Document their exact language. Look for patterns across multiple conversations. When the same problem surfaces repeatedly in the same language, you have a validated problem worth building around. Validation comes before the offer is built, not after.

What questions should I ask potential clients to test my business idea?

Two questions do most of the work: "What's your biggest obstacle right now?" and "What have you already tried?" Follow-up questions like "What would a solution need to look like to actually work?" and "Who else do you know dealing with this?" add depth. Avoid leading questions that suggest your solution. The goal is to hear their problem in their words, not confirm your existing assumptions.

How do I know if my expertise is something people will actually pay for?

The clearest signal is whether people describe the problem your expertise solves as a priority. If multiple people in your target market identify the same obstacle unprompted, and if they've already spent time or money trying to solve it, that's a strong indicator of willingness to pay. Expertise that addresses a problem people are actively trying to solve commands a price. Expertise that solves a problem people haven't prioritized does not.

What is customer discovery and how does it apply to coaching or consulting?

Customer discovery is the process of learning directly from potential clients what problems they face before you build your offer. For consultants and coaches, it means having structured conversations with people in your target market to understand their obstacles, their attempted solutions, and their desired outcomes. The insights from those conversations shape your service offering, your pricing, and your marketing language. It's the foundation of a business built on real demand rather than assumptions.

How many conversations do I need before I can trust my validation data?

Ten conversations with people who genuinely match your target client profile will surface meaningful patterns. You'll know you've done enough when you start hearing the same problems described in similar language across multiple conversations. If every conversation surfaces completely different challenges, you may need to narrow your target audience before continuing. Quality of fit matters more than quantity of conversations.

What's the difference between a survey and a customer interview for business validation?

Interviews give you depth. Surveys give you breadth. Use interviews early, when you're still trying to understand the shape of the problem. Use surveys once you have a hypothesis you want to quantify across a larger group. For most professionals starting out, interviews come first. They surface the insights. Surveys can then confirm how widespread those insights are before you commit to a full offer build.

How do I find people to interview when I'm just starting my consulting business?

Start with your existing professional network. Former colleagues, industry association contacts, LinkedIn connections, and alumni networks are all legitimate starting points. Frame the request honestly: you're developing something new and want 15 minutes of their perspective. Most professionals respond positively to that request, particularly when it comes from a trusted contact. You don't need a large audience to run meaningful validation. You need 10 conversations with the right people.

Start With 10 Conversations

The most successful second-act businesses aren't built on genius ideas. They're built on validated problems and tested solutions.

Your decades of expertise are real and valuable. But if you build from assumption rather than evidence, you risk spending months creating something the market didn't ask for. The validation process described here costs nothing but time, and it dramatically improves your odds of building something people will actually pay for.

Ten conversations. Two questions. Document what you hear. That's it.

If you're ready to take the next step, the Retirepreneur Hub has templates and frameworks designed specifically for professionals 55+ building consulting, coaching, and course/cohort/community businesses. Everything is free, no credit card required.

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Curt Roese, CPA is the Founder of Retirepreneur and a former CFO helping professionals 55+ turn decades of expertise into consulting, coaching, and course/cohort/community businesses. Learn more about Curt here.