This video emphasizes the critical role of validating a business idea before fully committing to it. It spotlights various marketing tactics entrepreneurs can employ to assess whether their idea will attract customers or fall flat, minimizing risk.
What this video covers
Validating a business idea is essential. Before you give your notice, before you take that leap of faith and throw yourself out there and put yourself all-in to go after that idea, you need to know if that idea is going to be valid, if that idea has legs or not. In marketing, it’s a great way to understand and see if there are going to be either customers or if there are going to be crickets when you launch. That’s why it’s essential, and in today’s video, we’re going to be breaking down some of those marketing tactics so that you can use them for yourself to validate your own idea and take it from there. So with that being said, let’s get into it.
The importance of validating your business idea. This is not like going to Vegas. This is not like going and making a bet. You’re putting your life on the line. You’re throwing away and putting aside everything, your professional career, for something new – for a new chapter. This is why you want to validate it. You want to make sure that there are going to be customers that are going to be willing to pay for that product or that service that you’re bringing to market. That type of validation, that type of social approval or social proof, is something that especially investors are going to want and expect that you bring to the table.
Rather than going to an investor and saying, “I’m raising money for this. It’s going to be a cool idea.” How would it be if you go to the investor and you say, “We’re raising money for this? We’ve already done multiple tests. Here’s the validation. Here’s the data, and we are ready to roll.” That’s the type of confidence, that’s the type of research and due diligence and understanding of the market that you’ve done to get to a point of comfort and to get to a point where you know that there is going to be cheese at the end of the tunnel.
One of the tactics that you can use is landing pages. Landing pages are fantastic because they allow you to not wait until you have that product or that service already done. Here, you can use pages like LaunchRock or hitting GoDaddy. You can put a Coming Soon page. Or with Instapage, for example, you can create a landing page where you’re giving an idea of what that customer is about to see.
Basically, it allows you to see if they would be willing to purchase it. You can even create check-out pages that are attached to that landing page with tools like SamCart.
Surveys are also a great way to understand what your customers want and need. Here, you can create a set of questions. It could be using online sites like SurveyMonkey, where you get people to just go there, fill in, and then you can start to analyze what kind of patterns you’re receiving that are similar from one user to another user that responded. You can even take it to the street and ask certain questions to some of your potential customers and see what they’re saying.
Pay per click ads are also a great way. Here what you can do is you can attach that landing page that we were talking earlier about to an ad. Then, on the ad, you start driving your potential audience or your potential customers to that landing page or to that survey and then see how they are behaving. What kind of response are they getting? If you have two ideas, would they click more on Idea A versus Idea B? That type of data is going to be very telling for you because here you get to see a large number of people interacting with what you’re thinking about creating, and this is ultimately going to help you to understand where you’re going to be able to make the most amount of money.
In-person sales. This is a fantastic way to really understand if the idea has legs or not. In many cases, you wouldn’t believe how some of those incredibly successful entrepreneurs have actually gone door-to-door in order to get people to pay for whatever they were doing. That’s going to help you understand what they think or how they feel about what you’re bringing to market.
