IDEA VALIDATION 101
3 smart ways to not waste time and money.
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A lot of entrepreneurs face the situation of having what looks like a 1 billion dollars idea, but even though you probably don’t hear about it very often, their ideas fail. Some fail in the very beginning, before they even started working on them. Some fail after 2 years of pure hustle, sweat and tears.
Why is it so some people quit on their ideas very early and some not? In most cases it comes to one simple thing: validating your idea before you press the start button.

Idea validation process

There’re a lot of ways to finding out if your idea is worth it. Let us share with you some of them, which we find very useful and easy to put into life:

Google It

The simplest one is doing a small homework by searching your idea in Google. Yup, it may sound funny, but actually a lot of “brilliant” ideas we can come up with are probably already done by someone else. But even if it’s done by someone else, don’t just simply give up. If that would be a solution, we’d probably never had Facebook, Apple or Tesla. Make a deeper research. Is there something that you think can be done better? Maybe you were thinking of some unique feature that present solutions are lacking? You need to check everything, because at the end of the day - perfection is not attainable, or as Robert Muller, ex-FBI Director, once said: “There are only two types of companies: those that have been hacked, and those that will be”. And I think it suits the startup world as well. No-one sits in the captain’s seat forever. ;)

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Talk About It

The second way of validating your idea is going to a conference or even your local entrepreneurs meetup and asking people what kind of problems they have in a field that you’re planning to enter. You can ask them if they’d be willing to pay for a solution that would help them with their problem? Would they be happy to pay 10$, 100$ or maybe even 1000$? If they will tell you that they would not, then probably it’s time to reassess. But don’t forget to ask them WHY? exactly they are not willing to pay for it? Maybe it’s not the whole idea that is bad. Maybe you can tweak it in some way and that would change everything. And don’t be afraid that someone will steal it. Even though it’s a completely valid concern, it will happen eventually anyway. Just make sure you make it better or you bring it to the market faster. You can try patenting it, but it’s a pretty expensive and tricky solution that might not work.

Fake It Till You Make It

The third thing is actually very smart and I personally like it very much. It will take you a bit more time and effort, but also can massively help in validating your idea. I’m talking about creating a landing page describing your solution, features that you’re planning to have, showing some design mockups or even a demo (it takes us up to 48 hours to create a working prototype) and in general acting like you already have your product in development. Then include a simple subscription form asking for an email, which is going to be used to inform everyone when the product is released. It will allow you to see if people are actually interested in whatever you have for them. It’s a great way to check if the market needs you, without wasting a lot of money on creating an actual product.

In case you’re still sceptical about the usefulness of such an approach, let me convince you with some examples. You definitely heard ofDropbox, right? Well, they had no actual product when they released their intro video:



The results were phenomenal! Over-night they got tens of thousands of sign-ups from people who wanted to try their cloud solution. That success eventually led to them raising $250m capital for growth.

Still not convinced? Have you ever heard of Zappos? It’s an online shoe and clothing shop, acquired by Amazon for $1,2 billion in 2009. Nick Swinmurn founded Zappos in 1999. He wanted to prove that there’s a demand for such a business and to do so he went to the local shoe shops and took pictures of what they had to offer. He then created a very simple website where he displayed those pictures. When someone placed an order, Nich would go to the shop, buy that pair of shoes, paying full price, and then he’d deliver the order. He did it. He proved that his idea for an online shop is working and eventually grew it to become a billion dollar business.

What’s next?

When you’ve successfully tested your idea, you go a little bit further and create an MVP (which we can help you with - just send us an email - and we’ll get in touch with you ASAP) or if you think you will need more budget than you have - you can always try some crowdfunding platform (i.e. Kickstarter, IndieGoGo, etc.).

If you have your own crazy story of how you validated your business idea, please share it with us in the comments section below.

That’s all for now, we’ll see you in a bit. Have a great day! ;)

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