In this episode of One Question Friday, Sam Parr answers a caller’s question about how to test and validate business ideas. He outlines three escalating‑fidelity approaches. The first is low‑fidelity: conduct problem‑oriented customer interviews using the principles from The MOM Test, focusing on the customer’s pain, how big the problem is, and the language they use, while avoiding pitching. The second is medium‑fidelity: create a concrete offer (landing page, ad, flyer, email, or simple payment request) and ask prospects to pre‑commit, adding friction (e.g., a small payment) to gauge real demand. The third, highest‑fidelity method is to become the customer yourself or deeply embed with target users—interning, shadowing, or building a solution for a problem you personally experience—so you have near‑certain knowledge of the problem and a ready‑made solution. Sam illustrates each method with real examples: a basketball‑camp pitch that secured a $1,800 commitment via Venmo; Zooper’s founder who spent a year talking to electricians and secured pre‑commitments before building; and Al from Next Health who worked as a medical secretary to design software for doctors. He stresses that volume matters—talking to hundreds of prospects and maintaining high intensity is crucial—and that courage is required to execute these tests, as many founders are held back by fear.
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Hey MFM, this is Bernard from Berlin, Germany. My question is about testing your business ideas. So I've heard a bunch of people on your podcast talk about this already and how it's part of what made them successful. Now I don't really understand what this means, testing your business ideas. The only thing I can think of is maybe running multiple ads and comparing the performance. But beyond that, I really don't know what to do. So could you first of all tell me how you have seen this done successfully in the past? And second of all, how I can become better at it?
Thank you.
All right. The guy asked Sean, he said, I hear you talk about testing ideas. What does that mean? Does that mean just like running ads to like a page and getting sales? And the answer is yes, that is our way. But he wants to know about testing ideas and how do you do that?
All right. So we can share a couple of things that, uh, I think you talked about this in the last One Question Friday, but the first is customer conversations and the MOM test. So the real, there's a book called The MOM Test, worth reading, uh, if you want to get better at this stuff. But here's the premise, which is talk to customers and your, the rule is don't make the mistake everybody does. Don't pitch your product and just wait for them to politely be like, yeah, sounds really interesting. Let me know. 'Cause that's like a false positive. You're only allowed to talk to them about their problem. So you do what's called a problem interview. You just talk to them about their life, what they're, you know, in their business, whatever, whatever your area, your product's in. You ask them questions. You try to see, A, is this a real problem for them? Uh, B, how big of a problem is it? Like, dude, this is the biggest issue in my life right now. Or, uh, it's nice to have. And you can suss that out by trying to figure out, okay, so what have you done to try to solve this? And if they don't really say anything, well then it's probably not actually that big of a problem. They haven't been trying to solve it. If they've tried like 8 solutions and none of it's working and they're just banging their head against the wall, you know it's a real problem. And so you try to figure out the problem, you try to figure out how big of a problem, and you try to figure out the words they use to describe it as a problem, 'cause that's what you're gonna use to create your solution. And then separately you could say, well, I'm working on a way to solve that. It'll be XYZ. Are you interested in trying it? And then they say yes, and you say great. And then you make them pay some price, whether it's literally pay money or give, give your information or connect your account so I can have your data or whatever. Make them do something that has some friction so you can gauge if they're really interested or not. That's one way you could test an idea.
And that's exactly what you did this weekend. We just talked about the basketball camp thing that Sean did. You told me what the idea was and he goes, if you're, if this interests you, Venmo me $1,800 right now. And we all did. And there was no website, there was nothing. It was just a phone call, a text. Twitter thing. And that's the way I typically do things. Oftentimes it'll take maybe 20 or 30 calls, uh, and I can probably get one person to show interest. But that's where a lot of people fail, is they actually don't talk to enough people. Um, so for my latest thing, I've actually talked to like 300 people. And, um, you have to talk to a lot of people. I invested in this one company and they were trying to get customers and I'm like, well, how many talked to you? Like, well, we talked to like one person last week and then a person the week before. I'm like, Oh dude, it's gotta be from like 8:00 AM to like 7:00 PM and you're on calls all day. Um, and that's that, that, that, that, that way I think typically works, but most people don't, don't have enough intensity around it.
There's another way, which is you take a, a pre-validated idea. So you take an idea that's already working and you just put, uh, you change it in some way. So, oh, it's working in the US, but there's no version of this in Europe. It's, there's a pretty good bet that the behaviors in the US are gonna translate to, let's say Europe or wherever. And so you can skip the validation idea, the validation point that way. I actually think validating an idea is really, really hard. I actually don't think you're ever gonna get this clear signal that like, yep, check. I know that people want this. It's just like a spectrum. You're just increasing your confidence level that there's a real there there, but you're never at 100%. And until you, you know, many, many months in, too far in. The second thing is another way to skip the line is Just work on something where you know you're the customer, cuz if you're the customer for it, I guarantee you on an internet scale that there are at least another 100,000 people that are just like you, that have the same problem as you, that feel the same way you do. You may not be able to find them, you may not be able to market to them, but they definitely exist. And so one way to validate your idea is to just build something that solves a problem for you. Very rarely will that be too small where it's only you or only you and 10 other people that have that problem. Almost always there's a huge group.
This data is wrong every freaking time.
Have you heard of HubSpot? HubSpot is a CRM platform where everything is fully integrated.
Whoa, I can see the client's whole history— calls, support tickets, emails— and here's a task from 3 days ago I totally missed.
HubSpot, grow better.
And there's sometimes, or a lot of times, like let's say like HubSpot or some type of software like Riverside, what we're using now, where it's like, it's a little bit challenging to get customers before the thing is actually built. And that definitely exists. And there's this company that I talked to called Zooper, Z-U-P-E-R.co. And their headline is power your field service and deliver a better customer service. Basically, it's an app where if you're an electrician, all your electricians who work for you, they go out and they, it's like timetables and all this stuff. And he was like, I was like, how did you do this? And he said, well, I just, spent all my nights and weekends talking to these business owners, and I basically kind of interned for them, and I got to know them really well, and I honed in on the problem very specifically. And I got like pre-commitments. They didn't pay me, but they told me if I can do X, Y, and Z, they'll be my customer. And so I didn't validate it in the sense of I collected money, but I knew with a high degree of certainty what the problem was because I spent a year working with these people and talking to them. And then when I built it, it took about 6 months to get my first customer. And I know another guy who did that. Al from Next Health. It's like a billion-dollar company now, and he did the same thing. He built software for doctors and he goes, I quit my job and I became a secretary at a doctor's office for 6 months to learn exactly how they do things. So I knew very specifically the software that I was building, how it was gonna solve a problem. And so I didn't validate it in the sense of I collected money, but like I validated it in my mind of I had a higher degree of certainty.
So to summarize, 3 ways that you can validate your ideas. The worst way, or the sort of least fidelity way, uh, go talk to as many customers as you can, go 9 to 5, go shadow them, try to talk to them about their problems, figure out how big of a problem it is and what they do to solve it today. The second, uh, you know, a higher fidelity way, you actually have an offer. It's a landing page, it's a, it's an ad, it's a flyer, it's an email, and you try to get people to pre-commit to a solution that will also validate that there's demand to this. And then the best way of all the ways is You know there's demand because you have the problem. And if you have the problem, you know it well, you know what solution would work, you have a place to test it. You can be patient zero and you can test it on yourself. And if you do all that, um, you know, you're not guessing, do, is this problem real or not? Cuz you know it's real.
And all of these take a lot of courage. A lot of people don't do 'em because they're afraid. Everyone's afraid. You just gotta do it. Uh, and you can get done, you can get a lot done by just having some courage and actually following these steps. So, That's One Question Friday.
