Do You Know the First Thing You Should Do When You Get the next Billion Dollar Idea? Validate!

Research! Do a lot of market research! Get out of your fucking chair and go meet people!

Go checkout similar companies that are already up and running(If there are any). You can learn a lot by visiting these places. Go as a customer and see how everything works. That’ll help you understand what things they do right and what they are missing. Use this data to shape your model.

Run a survey and post it out to the world to get feedback. You can post an advert on craigslist and find some people to talk to as well (You can ask for 15–30 mins of their time for a gift card or something like that). Trust me you’ll be able to gather a lot of valuable feedback.

Checkout quora/reddit and other social media groups and get feedback from the members.

If possible go out and build an MVP and put it out to the market to validate. This depends on what type of business you are going to work on but if you can put out an MVP to at least a controlled audience the feedback that you would be able to gather from that would be enormous. This will help you save a lot of time and effort going forward.

Try and find a mentor, a veteran in the industry you are planning to go to and get his/her feedback. They would be able to help you with nitty gritty details of the industry, how it operates, how does people in your industry think, how receptive they are to change etc.

After going through this process you’ll understand the dynamics of the market. Whether there is opportunity for a newcomer to enter the market or not, if yes, the best way you can go about it.

Don’t overlook this phase. Proper market research before starting an endavour will save you a lot of sleepless nights and massive amounts of stress. Not to mention some dollars as well, probably a million or two. ;)