How to Test Your Business Idea in a Few Days

It’s a well-known fact that 90% of startups fail in the first year. Why? In the majority of cases, the young entrepreneur pursued the wrong ideas. They invest a lot of time and resources in developing their product or service, building the website, setting up marketing campaigns and strategizing. Then, it turns out the market is not interested in their offering. What could have saved them from failure? Testing their business idea in a couple of days.

Find the right business idea

The main problem for many young entrepreneurs is their desire to spend days and weeks on each stage of product development without testing their idea first and getting feedback from potential clients. They believe that their product should be perfect before hitting the stores. However, if you cannot sell 20 copies of your product, you will never sell 100.

“Try before you buy”, many companies offer to consumers. “Test before you launch” is what I say to startup founders.

To launch your business, you don’t need a long term strategy, fancy office, huge budget, or even a ready product. It’s enough to have an interesting idea, some understanding of the market, and a confident presentation of your business case for potential customers.

Don’t try to go too big or complex, start with a simple product or service. With my company, LinguaTrip.com, we wanted to become an Expedia for language courses abroad, but we did not have any resources to reach such a scale from the beginning. What we had were our expertise and passion, so we started with the most basic service we could offer — private consultations.

There is no need to invest in a fancy website and a huge advertising campaign from the beginning. Instead, go to your own network: friends, relatives, social media followers — and share your idea with them.

Use a landing page and social media posts to present your product or service in the best way. Producing this content will take a few hours at most and can be done free of charge with popular website constructors like Tilda, Wix.com or Wordpress. No special knowledge, web-development skills, or professional copywriters needed. Just show your expertise, present the service or product, highlight its value for potential customers, and add a booking form. Most of the modern platforms support simple payment systems so you can easily set up your business account with PayPal or Stripe.

Then, drive traffic to this page and see if there is any actual interest in your product in the market. When you get your first bookings, you can actually work out the service or product you’ve advertised. Just state the realistic date of the product release or service delivery. In the worst-case scenario, if for any reason you cannot create the product you promised or the interest is too low to make it happen, you can make refunds. In the best case, you’ve got your first clients.

Work with your community

As I said before, start with your own community. However, I don’t mean you should ask your mom or your best friends for their opinions. Instead, make people vote with money and get actual orders from them. This way, instead of supportive speeches and cheerful but fake feedback, you’ll get the real feel of the market.

As an expert in your area, you definitely have access to a network of like-minded people. It can be online communities, your connections on LinkedIn, or people you meet at thematic events, conferences and meet-ups. Roll out your ideas to them, pitch your business there, and see if you manage to get some leads.

If you have a product or service for a B2B audience, reaching out to professional networks and presenting your ideas at the industry events and conferences becomes especially important. Try to get access to a few relevant events and professional communities. There, invest in building a personal relationship with potential clients. When they know you and trust you, they will be more willing to learn about your product or service.

Start building your social media following in advance through sharing your expertise. People tend to follow the accounts that share either something useful or entertaining.

Try to be both, and present your knowledge in an interesting and easy-to-comprehend manner. When people see your expertise and find your content useful, they are more likely to listen to your advice about products and services to use as well. That’s your chance to market your own business and pitch it to a loyal audience.

Advertise wisely

The statistics show that for the majority of online businesses, about 30% of traffic comes from their own social media and blogs, the other 70% comes via paid ads. So you should not completely ignore paid channels of acquisition. However, make sure to approach ads smartly and don’t simply lead traffic to your page. Instead, start collecting the email addresses of your potential customers.

You can do this by offering something nice and useful for free. For instance, if I promoted my course on starting a YouTube channel, I would start by creating a checklist of video topics that always go viral on YouTube. Then, I would launch ads in social media or via Google to offer people my free checklist in exchange for their email addresses. This way, you start building trust in your brand and expertise as well as get the leads to work with further on. A few days later, you may send them an email with some further tips on creating a YouTube channel. Then, another one. And then start selling your product — the course on starting a YouTube channel — with a special offer.

To set up the ads, try to set the targeting smart and instead of using simple demographic data, play with interests of your potential customers. In Facebook Ads and Google Ads, you can define the keywords people use to find information, the groups they follow, the media they read. Target people who use the products or services of your competitors to get the relevant audience.

If you follow these instructions, you avoid pitching the product or service to a so-called ‘cold’ audience. Instead, you prove your worth, make them interested in you and your services and then offer something they need.

Running such a campaign would take a couple of weeks, but if there is any interest in your product in the market, you’ll see the results in a couple of days. If there are no subscriptions and clicks on your link, probably, the audience wants something different.

Scale your business step by step

After the first campaign has run successfully and you’ve got your first clients and your first income, it’s time to start growing your business. Now, when you see what your customers actually want and you have their feedback, you can start working in a few directions.

First of all, developing, modifying and perfecting your product or service to better meet market demand. Secondly, investing more in your website and marketing. This is especially important for service providers. While with a physical product you may want to go investing in better package design, faster delivery service, or more selling points, with services you don’t need to care about any of these elements. You can focus on your presentation of the services and find more optimal ways to engage your potential customers online to make them ready to pay for your service.

Another thing to focus on is the price of your product or service. Be realistic about its value and do not try to price it too low (that will make it difficult to get your money back quickly) or too high (this will make conversions much lower).

From my experience, the best price to start is about $20-$30. People are more willing to spend this amount than a few hundred on a brand-new product or service on the market.

After you’ve established your loyal community, you can start to offer new, more expensive products. After knowing your value and the quality of your previous products/services, these people will be more willing to spend more with you. At the same time, you can start increasing the price of your initial offering for as long as there is still market demand for it.

Summary

The key elements of starting a successful business are having a clear idea of your product or services, testing the market before investing in your business, and acting fast. Starting with a simple landing page, your own social media channels and a small advertising campaign, you will reach a specific target audience and see if there is interest in your offering in a few days. Don’t be afraid to start with nothing: if your idea is worthy, the first customers will come. The first income will become a basis for the further growth of your business.