First up, congratulations. The fact you’re here means you’re ready to start your disruptive business journey, which in itself is more of an achievement than you might think.
Upwards of 660,000 people in the UK take the leap to become an entrepreneur every year, an extraordinary number that becomes less shocking when you consider the millions who let their ideas rust and collect dust.
This is market validation, and it’s one of the most important steps in every entrepreneur’s journey. After working with hundreds of startups over the past decade, we’ve seen lots of validation methods come and go. Below are the four rules that have always held true.
This is about trimming down your business concepts. This is about getting lean. Dragging your idea from concept to reality is going to take a lot of time and money. A startup ship often sinks for holding too much cargo. To keep your head above water, you need to develop the very basic version of your product; the Minimum Viable Product. You achieve this by reducing your business idea to its most important core feature, excluding all features that can be added on later.
It’s the Achilles’ heel of the majority of startups; being so fixated on growth and invested in bringing your idea to life that you fail to realise you’ve created a solution for a problem that doesn’t exist. Customer interviews with people in your target market are critical, and should always take place before you’ve made a significant investment. What you’re looking for, more than anything else, are problems.
This is an inherently subjective process. Most people you’ll talk to will want to keep you happy. To eliminate as many “false positives” as possible, prime your subjects to skew objective. A person liking your idea is not the same as a person buying your product. When someone tells you “wow, that’s cool!” your first reaction should be to ask, “why?” Don’t be tempted to play down or ignore the naysayers; negative feedback = opportunities to improve your idea.
No idea is 100 percent unique; there will always be businesses out in the world that are similar to yours. It means there’s a market for your idea. The challenge is making sure you capture that market. Research the companies that could become your competition: how much they charge, the shape of their business model, who their target audience is and how they market to them.
There’s plenty of evidence that a recession is as good a time as any to start a business. General Motors, Burger King, CNN, Uber and Airbnb, to name a few, were all founded in the midst of economic downturns. Following these steps in bringing your concept to life will help turn a well-founded idea into a matter of fact, not opinion.
