MBA1815 Q&A Wednesday: How do I know If there is a market for my product?

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So Shelly wants to make sure that there's a market for her product before she builds it. How can she know? Before I go through my full on game plan for you so you can know exactly how to validate that there is a market for your product, I should mention that you should make full use of Google Trends. Google Trends is a very, very simple and free tool. If something's trending in the marketplace are people searching for these terms, for these words? Just Google Google Trends and you'll find it. And basically you could search anything that you are thinking about. So say for example, I want to create a product that solves a particular problem like smudges on my phone screen. Let's say I have a product that solves this problem that actually will create a film that will make your phone screen smudge proof. So if I Google the term in Google Trends, smudges on phone screen, I can see if this term is trending. If this is something that's popular, if this is something that people are searching for. For example, if you go to Google Trends and you search the term work from home, you'll see that that term was trending sky High from March 2020 throughout the rest of the year. So Google Trends is a really good tool to get an understanding of what people are searching for. Now before you invest in creating your product, a great exercise for you to do is to create a compelling landing page. And this basically just means a page on the web. This could be a page on your existing website, your personal website for example, or just a fresh page on the web. You don't even need to buy a URL or domain. You can use a tool like Leadpages or Swipe Pages. If you these are landing page softwares where you can create a simple landing page that you can use. They'll give you a link that you can host it on. It's very, very simple. Now why? Because you need to be able to communicate what your product will do on this landing page. It's basically A sales page. Now you're not going to actually sell the product, but you're going to gauge interest. So say for example, we're going to go with the same problem that we talked about before, smudges on your phone screen. And I am coming up with a smudge free phone screen protector. I will create a full landing page on this protector. I'm going to describe what the problem is, I'm going to describe what my solution is, how I solve it. I might have put some mock ups and some images that will represent what it's going to look like. I'll explain why it's better than the competition. I'll explain why this is the best screen protector you can get to prevent smudges. Now the reason why I encourage you to do this is because this forces you to learn how to communicate and describe your product properly and to sell your product really. It forces you to really spend the time, even if this just takes a few days to write down how you solve your problem, what makes you unique, why anybody should be excited about this product. Once you create this landing page and publish it and it's available for people to visit, you have a really good starting point. Now on this landing page, what you want to do is collect email addresses and you don't need to charge anybody anything, but you could just say, hey, leave your email and get a special launch discount when this product comes out. Also get updates on when it's going to come out and even updates on what the price is going to be, all that kind of stuff. So the point here is, is that you're just collecting interest, you're collecting email. If somebody likes this product, they're going to put their email because they're like, hey, I'd love to get a discount code when it launches and get a discount. If they're not interested in it, they're not going to leave their email. So this is kind of the gauge here. And most landing page softwares will make this super simple. You can collect email right inside the app. I know Swipe Pages does this. It's nice and easy and I like to use Swipe Pages because the pages are really, really fast and optimized for Google. So you have your landing page with your opt in on it. What do you do now? Well, now you need to drive traffic to this page. This is where you're going to invest a little bit of money to see if there's interest in this product. This means running Google Ads or Facebook ads to this page. And you can use the keywords that people would search for in Google, for example, and have this ad show up. Like for example, how to get rid of smudges on your iPhone screen or iPhone screen cleaner or whatever you think people would search to solve this problem. When they search, they'll see this ad. Or of course you can use Facebook ads, which will display the ads to people that you think would would be interested in this product. If you're looking for an easy tool to run ads, I recommend adespresso, very, very simple tool to split test your ads. I recommend spending between $250 and $500 on these ad campaigns to see if people are interested. If you do get signups, what you're looking for here is a minimum of a 10% conversion. Remember, they're not buying anything here. They're just leaving their email for updates and a discount. So if you hit 10%, meaning that 10 people landed on the page and one person signs up. So for every 10, you have one person sign up, this means you might have something that is worth pursuing. Let me explain this even further. Let's say, for example, it costs you a dollar a click to get somebody to go to your page using ads. Whether you're running Facebook ads or Google Ads, you spend $300 on ads. That means you got 300 clicks. If you get 30 signups from those 300 clicks, you potentially have a product worth building. Not only now do you have some interest, but you have some people you can contact to learn a little bit more about what they're looking for. So you can build the perfect product for your customers. In this process, you spend $300 a couple days building a landing page and you validated your business idea. Now, what's great about this is that $300 is nothing compared to how much you can lose building a product and selling it. Finding out there are no customers, there is no market. USAA knows dynamic duos can save the day like superheroes and Sidekicks or auto and home insurance. With usaa, you can bundle your auto and home and save up to 10%. Tap the banner to learn more and get a'@usaa.com bundle restrictions apply. Let's say, for example, you run through this testing process. You put your landing page, you run your ads, and you don't get anybody to bite. Don't be discouraged, okay? It can be one of three things you need to change your sales page, your actual landing page. Maybe it's not descriptive enough. Maybe you're not showing how your product can really solve a actual problem. And you're not defining the problem well enough. So maybe there's an issue with your landing page. You can always, you know, go on Fiverr or Upwork and get a copy expert to do a page teardown to audit your page. The second issue that it could possibly be is your ads. Maybe your ads are not optimized. Maybe your ads are not specific enough. Again, in this point, you can always hire an expert. This is not going to cost you too much. It can cost you like a hundred dollars to hire somebody to audit your ads. You can find somebody on Fiverr or Upwork and say, tweak this, change this, and they can really optimize. Optimizing something doesn't cost too much money. It didn't take too much time. Building it from scratch is what takes a lot of money and a lot of time. If you get some consultant to come in and take a look, they're going to take an hour or two of their time and be able to help you tremendously. If it's not the landing page and it's not the ads, then the third reason why it's not doing well, it's because the product doesn't have a market and you dodged a bullet. That's not a bad thing. It's time to pivot. It's time to change the product or move on to something else. And again, don't be discouraged. There are so many examples I can give you of failed product ideas. I've had failed ideas for businesses, and as bad as it feels in the moment, I look back at it feeling so relieved I did not build the business around a dud idea. Thanks so much for asking your question, Shelley. And thanks everybody for listening to today's episode. If you love Q and A Wednesdays and you have a question you want to ask, go ahead and ask it. Just email me over@omar00mba.net I'd be happy to answer your question. Help you and help all those who are listening. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Don't make too many assumptions. A lot of entrepreneurs, when they get started, they just feel like, I think this is a good idea. My gut tells me this. They invest and build and spend without any hard data. Get some evidence, get some data to back your hunches, especially in the beginning, because this is going to really validate what you feel. Because this is not about what you feel, it's about what you know. And if you can prove, hey, what you feel is actual fact and people actually want this product, then go for it. This is not to kill your fire or to kill the excitement. This is to make sure you're building on solid ground. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

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