Test your business idea with three cheap methods before spending real money. Build a landing page and track clicks, ask customers for deposits to prove they'll pay, or interview potential users about their needs and willingness to buy.
Here are 3 ways to test your business idea and whether it will work before you actually go ahead and launch it. So idea number 1 is to tell the world about it. And the simplest way of doing that is creating a landing page. There are tons of tools that allow you to do that and then drive traffic to it through your social content or maybe by spending a little bit of money on some ads to see if people resonate with the idea that you have. So essentially you're not building any product or service, you're just talking about it in the public space. So that's number one. Number 2 is to actually ask people for money for this thing before you build it, right? So I was speaking with a friend the other day and she has this idea that requires the importation of a new good. And I said, well, why don't you gauge interest by asking people if they would be willing to essentially put down a deposit for this thing? It's a very common thing that you do with platforms like Kickstarter and elsewhere, but you can also do that with physical products saying, hey, I'm thinking about doing this thing, importing this thing, doing this thing. Would you participate in that by paying me a deposit so we can get started? And as you do that, ask people, okay, so how do you solve this problem? How would you feel about this solution? How do you— well, how would you use this product if it existed? Essentially having a conversation with folks is another way of validating your idea. So those were the 3 things. Talk about it publicly, maybe through a landing page and driving traffic. The second one is asking people to prepay or deposit to see if it really has legs. Will they pay for what you're proposing? And the third way is to have these conversations, in-depth interviews with your customers to see if they would be willing to pay for what it is that you're proposing. So those are 3 ways to validate it. Do that, doesn't cost you any money or a lot of money, but it does cost you time. It's a very good way to get started on a new business and validating it before you actually invest significant amount of money and significant amount of time.
