You have a new business idea or a new line of products or services that you want to launch, but you’re not sure if it’s going to be a success. You know that can be risky if you spend your time and money in it and if then it just fails and you find yourself broke over a bad business idea.

That’s why you keep on postposing launching your idea.

It’s a vicious circle, isn’t it?

We need to be as sure as possible when doing an investment. If you follow these tips, you’ll be able to validate a business idea before launching it to minimise risks.

1. Test the waters

You need to start analysing the main concept of your idea.

Is it going to work within your niche?

If you have already a list of subscribers, you can simply ask them. You can send them a short survey asking them if they’d be interested in your idea and their thoughts about it.

If you don’t have a list of subscribers yet, you’ll need to do some market research. Try to explore different forums and websites such as Amazon or Udemy to verify if people are asking questions related to your business idea.

If you have a corporate blog, you can publish a post tackling something related to your idea to analyse how people react to it.

Be subtle, but keep your eyes open and read opinions of people, both your subscribers and potential clients out there.

 

2. Analyse you business idea

[Tweet “Is your idea filling a gap in the market?”]

That’s the main question that you should answer. How your idea is going to fill this gap and why it is different from the rest of similar ideas.

It’s very useful to have a look at your new project from an outside perspective. If you were one of your potential clients, would you invest in your own idea?

Make a list of why you would invest in it, and exploit these aspects when launching it; also, make a list of why you wouldn’t and try to solve these points before launching it, or tackle them in a way that the benefits overcome the disadvantages.

 

3. Find similar business ideas

Has anyone already thought about a similar idea? This could be a good and a bad thing:

A good thing because someone tested the idea for you. You just have to analyse if it worked or not, and improve the aspects that failed. I’m not saying that you have to copy someone else’s idea to make your own succeed. You just have to analyse if there was a niche in the market for that similar idea and if people were willing to invest in it.

On the other hand, it can also be bad news, because someone has already filled a gap in the market. In this case you should ask yourself if there’s enough space in the market for both ideas or not.

You’ll also have to make your idea (or its approach) different to stand out.

 

4. Stay tuned with market news

And this is one of the most important parts. You don’t know when the best opportunity to launch your idea is going to come up. That’s why you should be informed of everything that’s happening out there.

Read blogs related to your idea, people talking about it on social media, read the newspapers and watch the news.

I know that all this information can be sometimes overwhelming. What I do is to set alerts on Google Alerts, so Google send me daily/weekly email with news related to my business idea.

Try to find the best keywords to analyse and set Google alerts so you’re not missing anything out.

 

5. Create a minimum viable product

This can be one of our biggest fears.

Invest time and money and then find yourself in the red over a failed business idea.

Here I recommend taking two pieces of paper:

In the first one, you’re going to jot down everything you need to invest in to launch the final product. How many hours do you have to spend working on this new project? How much money do you need to launch the product? Are you going to invest in marketing? How much time and how are you going to promote your business idea?

In the second piece of paper, you’re going to create a minimum viable product. In other words, the same product that you were thinking about but in a smaller scale.

You’ll need to prioritise here and think about what you can do to lunch the same idea, but with the minimum investment.

Obviously, this won’t be the final product/service, you’re just going to test your idea thought this minimum viable product.

For example, if you’re thinking about creating an online course, instead of spending a lot of time preparing all your lessons and investing in a platform to deliver them, you may consider launching a beta version of the course at a reduced price to test the idea first.

This way, if your idea doesn’t work, you’ll not have spent your entire budget.

 

6. Generate expectation to validate a business idea

Tell everyone that you’re working on a new exciting project. You can launch a first landing page so people can subscribe if they’re interested and you can send them tips about what your idea is about.

This way you’ll be able to analyse the response of your audience, and how many people are interested in your new idea.

Also, you’ll be able to work on your list before selling them the final product. They’ll be more likely to invest in your idea, if they are happy with what they’re getting from you in their inboxes.

You can send them some samples, remark the benefits, tell them how you’re working on it, etc.

The idea here again is to see the response from your audience.

 

7. Pre-sell your business idea

You can start selling your idea even before launching it.

Obviously, you can’t trick your audience saying that you’ve the best online course when you don’t.

However, you can tell them that you’re working on it, that there would be only 20 places during the first edition of your course and you promise to get it done by X months.

Of course, you’ll have to guarantee a refund if you don’t fulfil what you’ve promised or if you see that people aren’t interested in your idea.

A lot of ebook authors have done that even before starting writing the ebook. They start selling it before it was ready to be published at a special price.

 

Now that you know how to test a business idea before launching it, there’s no excuse to keep postponing it. Remember that it’s now or never.

 

[Tweet “If you don’t work on your idea, there would be someone that is already working on it.”]

Did you like it? Find out more on:

Feedly | Newsletter | Facebook | Twitter