How to validate your ideas this year


If you're launching a new business in 2026, you only need one tool to validate your idea:

Apollo

Not because it's the flashiest AI tool out there.

But because it answers the only question that actually matters:

"Can I get real, paying customers?"

I've launched 13 businesses. 9 failed.

Every single failure came down to the same problem:

I couldn't consistently get in front of the right people.

Here's what I wish I had back then:

Week 1: Validate that your market exists

"Find 1,000 companies matching my ideal customer profile"

In 5 minutes, you know if there's actually enough market to build a business around.

Week 2: Test if you can reach decision-makers

Apollo's AI Assistant identifies the actual buyers - not just company names, but the people who sign checks.

Week 3: See if your message resonates

"Write a 3-email sequence testing this value proposition."

You're in market before you've written a single line of code.

Week 4: Launch v1 of your offer

If the response rates are good, you've validated demand.

If they're not, you've saved yourself 6 months of building the wrong thing.

There’s a difference between guessing what the market wants and knowing.

Build your own thing in 2026.

No more excuses

Try Apollo here

Enjoy!

Tobi

Tobi Oluwole

Tobi Oluwole is a Nigerian-born entrepreneur, creator, and investor, and the Founder of Magnate Ventures, a holding company and investment firm partnering with founders, athletes, and creators to build profitable, scalable businesses. Over the past five years, he has grown a LinkedIn audience of 375,000+, generated 315M+ impressions, and helped clients earn over $35M in revenue.

Read more from Tobi Oluwole

A friend of mine built an agency from $0 to $500k in revenue in 1 year.He said the worst part of the job was outbound messaging. For almost 12 months, he would spend 30+ hours per week manually sending emails & DMs. By the time we were having this conversation, he was starting to feel burnt out. If you're trying to scale your business & find customers at scale, you need infrastructure. This is why tools like Apollo.io were created. Apollo helps teams use AI in ways that actually execute...

Every Sunday, I get an email that makes me a better creator. It's from Stanley - an AI tool that analyzes my LinkedIn posts. But here's what makes it different: It doesn't just show me what performed well. It shows me the outliers. → Posts that did way better than expected → Posts that underperformed when I thought they'd crush it → Patterns I never would have spotted myself Last month it showed me something interesting: My posts about other people's stories consistently outperform posts...

I got invited to Dubai earlier this year to speak at the 1 Billion Follower Summit. While I was there, Lamide asked me to be a guest on her podcast - Wealth Without Borders. She's grown this channel to over 200,000 subscribers in less than 2 years! I shared my journey from being an ex-pastor to joining Shopify & building my business on LinkedIn. We also touched on what true wealth is. Watch the episode on YouTube here Let me know if anything resonated with you. Tobi