How to validate your idea

One of the most common things people struggle with is validating their ideas. If you fail to properly validate your idea, you’re destined to waste time and money.

You might think you idea is great but the market doesn’t agree and thus does not buy it. Or, you might be close, but you’re off just a little bit and need to make some tweaks.

That is why you will hear people preaching about validating your idea before diving in and wasting time and money, but how do you validate your idea?

The #1 best validation method

Let’s not waste time building up to the best way to validate, we’ll jump right to it

Get strangers to pay you money.

Don’t ask your friends or family if they think the idea is good, they are going to tell you want you want to hear. Find strangers and get them to pay.

Let’s say you have a physical product you want to sell, get pictures or have mockups made, build a Shopify store and get it in front of your ideal customer and ask them to pay. If they send you money, you have something to work with.

But what do I do now if they sent me money and I have nothing to send them?

Easy… email the customer and let them know the situation. Tell them you are backordered and it’s going to be X weeks longer. Offer a partial refund or even a full refund. Offer to send them 2 for the trouble. Who cares, this was a cheap yet effective way to validate the idea, a short term loss will be made up over the long term.

You could do the same thing with a service. Built a site with a payment link and start getting people to pay.

You can also label them as presale and let the customer know where you’re at and when they will get delivery. Offer a full refund if you do not deliver by X date.

Survey your potential customers

Not as good of a validation method as the first but it’s viable. Create a survey that you send to potential customers. There are tons of questions you can ask them:

• What problem are they having?

• Is there a solution that would like to have or use?

• Have they tried other products before?

• What did they like or not like about those?

• Where they free or did they pay? How much if so?

• Etc.

If you get enough feedback, you can look for trends and similarities so you have something to start with. Even using this method, at some point before diving all in, you should try and collect money even if it’s just presales.

How do I find potential customers to do these methods?

There are a few ways you can find potential customers. The first is to run paid ads. This has been popular because you can target either the ideal demographic or search queries that your product fits.

Another method is to join communities around your problem or niche. Reddit is a huge community with tons of subreddits for just about anything. It’s so easy to find something relative and simply post a question, just be careful not to break the sub rules.

You can also join Facebook or Discord communities around the niche. These can be extremely active and they are a good way to get a lot of back-and-forth feedback. Again, just be careful promoting because you may break some rules and get kicked out.

What if it doesn’t work?

Well, you saved time and money.

You can either adjust your idea if you still think there is meat on the bone and you just started in the wrong spot, or you can move on entirely to a new idea.

There are tons of ideas and businesses out there. You don’t want to spend tons of time and money on the bad ones, that’s why it’s critical to validate each one first.