How to Prove your Business Idea is Terrible

Darrell Coker
Sep 6, 2018 · 6 min read

Research is key

You’ve come up with a brilliant business idea. Excited, you spend the next few weeks telling your friends, parents, cousins, colleagues, pets (and anyone who’ll listen) about your amazing idea. Several weeks pass by. And you’re no closer to validating whether you’re actually onto something.

I’ve fallen into this trap many times, coming up with dozens of pipe dreams during my time at school and University. But when co-founding Flair Football last year, it was a different story. We’ve by no means “made it” yet as a company, but since forming 18 months ago we’ve had some early wins, having grown to a team of 5, received backing from several credible investors, and built a hyper-engaged community on our beta app.

One thing I’ve learnt is that when first coming up with a business idea, you should focus almost all your attention on proving that your idea is terrible. This feels counter-intuitive. But unless you do so, you’ll probably end up wasting time and money building something that nobody wants.

In football, building a product without doing proper research is like stepping onto the pitch with a blindfold, and trying to pass it to a teammate from 40 yards away — you may get lucky, but you’ll probably miss.

I hope this post is useful for anyone thinking of launching a new business, especially those who are yet to speak to a potential customer.

Research with our target market

Invalidating your idea

For me, the early stages of invalidating an idea should be a 3-step process:

Step 1: Create a Beachhead

Step 2: Find a way of talking to people (scrap the surveys)

Step 3: Enter research mode (avoid the sales pitch)

Step 1: Create a Beachhead

If you look at today’s giant businesses, it feels like they serve the whole world. We can find almost anything on Google, buy almost any item on Amazon and listen to almost any song on Spotify. But these companies didn’t start that way. Usually they began by focusing on a “beachhead” — a single, core segment of their market that they cracked first before conquering the world. Amazon, for example, started off by focusing solely on books.

When we started Flair, we pictured building a social network for the entire youth football community, a market made up of 4 key user types — youth football players, their supporters on the sidelines, their coaches, and the youth football clubs themselves.

All 4 user types have very different needs.

Each segment of the youth football community has different needs

We worried about trying to meet the needs of everybody, only to dilute our messaging and meet the needs of no-one.

So, we decided to focus our research on youth football players. Specifically, players aged 12–14 from the Harrow Youth League in North-West London. We chose this beachhead because we felt the success of Flair most depended on uptake from this segment of the market, especially since football participation rates in the UK were highest around these ages. Also, my cousin and cofounder Nii lived near the Harrow Youth League, which made it easier to conduct user research.

Step 2: Find a way of talking to people (scrap the surveys)

Previously I’ve started a few projects where my idea of market research was to create a survey on Google Forms (littered with leading questions, of course), send it out to a few friends, compile the biased results, take a look at the graphs, and pat myself on the back after discovering that “80% of the market would definitely use this product”.

The only thing worse than no data, is bad data.

Whilst surveys can be useful, in the early stages of proving that your business idea is terrible there’s really no substitute for actually talking to people within your beachhead — whether that’s on the phone or in person. Talking to people helps you properly understand your potential consumers, as you can dig into their responses through follow-up questions.

At Flair, we had some obvious safeguarding challenges when talking to our market, since our beachhead users were youth football players aged 12–14. As we couldn’t reach out to them directly, our approach was to instead build relationships with their managers. Eventually, some of these managers started inviting us to their club’s summer tournaments, where we had the chance to meet the players and ask them questions.

Brook House FC, the first grassroots club to invite Flair to a summer tournament

Step 3: Enter Research Mode (avoid the sales pitch)

This is arguably the hardest part of the process. Once you’ve found a way to talk to people from your beachhead segment, the big temptation is to pitch your idea to them. But if you slip into sales mode, you’ll waste a great opportunity to truly learn about your target market — what their lives are like, what their problems are and how they currently deal with those problems.

Conducting effective research for Flair started off with a shift in mindset. We did most of our initial research at football tournaments — before each tournament I would remind myself that the sole aim was learning, not pitching. Then at the start of each conversation, I would explicitly tell each player that I was doing research for a football app and wanted to ask a few questions about their football lives and habits on social media.

I made a conscious effort not to go into detail about the app we were building. In fact, I didn’t even mention the app’s name or the fact that I was one of the co-founders. Once you start giving too many details about your product, you run the risk of people telling you the answers that they think you want to hear, rather than the truth. You’d be surprised how little information you sometimes need to give for people to happily tell you about their lives and problems.

Harrow Youth League summer tournament, hosted by Brook House FC

The End Result

By going through this 3-step process of creating a beachhead, talking to people and entering research mode, we learnt a huge amount about our target market. Firstly, we realised just how diverse our beachhead segment was. The needs and behaviours of each player we spoke with varied depending on characteristics like playing position, gender, ability level and personality. And this was just within the 12–14-year-old age group!

Based on this learning, we decided to start off by building a simpler product that focused solely on youth football players, removing the ability for coaches, supporters and clubs to create their own profiles.

We also learnt a huge amount about the footballing lives of our target market. In particular, we realised that the typical youth football player has very little video footage of their matches, mainly because most players don’t have the luxury of a parent capturing their every move on video. Based on this research, along with early usage data on the app, we built a core feature that wasn’t focused on video, but rather centres around allowing players to share an infographic of their matchday experience.

Flair’s core feature, built after market research

By proving that our initial idea was terrible, we managed to steer our product in a better direction. I hope this approach is helpful for anybody thinking of launching their own product or business.

Flair Football

Making every young football player feel like a star.

Darrell Coker

Written by

Co-Founder/Head of Product at Flair

Flair Football

Making every young football player feel like a star.

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