You have what you think is a great business idea but you're not sure if there are people that will actually
want your products and services.
The next step is to actually validate your business.
And there's two different ways that I suggest doing this.
First you have saaf allocation which is what you can do right now without an audience.
Literally as I teach you how to do it.
The SEC is hard validation.
And I'll talk about that coming right up.
But first let's talk about Scafell addition which basically means doing just a little bit of market
research yourself.
I like using tools like Google Facebook and YouTube to see if a topic is popular.
Now I'm a digital media company so this might look a little different than what you might do if for
example you're creating a brick and mortar business.
You still have to do digital even as a brick and mortar business.
But whereas I for this example I'm going to be looking to see if personal finance for millennials is
a great topic for a business or a great business idea.
You might be looking at oh is there a another Burt beer brewery in my city or how have breweries done
in the local cities around me that might be the kind of market research you do to see what type of competition
is out there.
If there is an audience for that competition it's relatively easy to go online and see what companies
are doing what you're doing.
How are they doing it and are they successful.
If there's another company that's doing exactly what you're doing and it doesn't seem like they have
a lot of followers on social media they it doesn't look like they have a lot of business going to their
Web site.
Then it might mean that your business idea is not valid.
Not necessarily because some companies are really really good without that social media presence but
it's a easy indicator for a lot of online products and online businesses.
So let's dive in and actually do a bit of validation.
For example as I mentioned I'm thinking about a business geared towards millennials about personal finance.
I know personal finance is a huge topic but I feel like there is a niche or an area that's not being
served as much as it could be and that's finance for millennials.
So the first thing that I would do is go to Amazon and search for your topic.
So I literally typed in personal finance for millennials and I see a few books pop up so I don't have
this I'm not the first person with this idea but right off the bat I can tell that this idea might not
be the best idea in terms of how we position it.
Millennials might not be the ones searching for personal finance advice and what happens when millennials
grow up and does this idea of personal finance for Millennials just not exist anymore.
Maybe a better idea is personal finance for young adults or personal finance for kids even because on
Amazon if I just type in let's just type in personal finance for example we type in personal finance
you see a lot more books with a lot more reviews.
Now the total number of books is an indicator but better yet the number of reviews that can indicate
whether a topic is popular or not.
Let's do one more search for personal finance for.
And sometimes I like to see what the auto search results pop up.
So you see Personal Finance for Dummies.
Personal Finance for teens personal finance for kids.
So let's do for teens there's a decent amount of books.
Some with more reviews than the millennial ideas so this automatically tells me that personal finance
for teens might be a better idea.
Young adults let's just see now here.
Personal Finance for young adults.
We've got more books with more reviews.
Now this isn't an end all be all sort of test to see if a topic is perfect or not but I know just from
some of these and some of the authors that I see that personal finance for just young adults might be
a better target audience.
Let's do the same on YouTube.
So I searched for personal finance for millennials and I already see that the first whistle is actually
from a channel called Millennial money.
So this is exactly my idea.
And let me just go to their channel just to see what they're actually doing.
But I'm guessing this is a channel that is geared towards millennials.
Let's just see if it's actually a relevant channel if they're posting a lot because they see the reviews.
Subscribers is very low and they're posting a few videos but not that many.
Now this is a good sign.
Did it just not work with there not an audience for it.
Or did she just not push far enough or harden enough to make it work.
Who knows.
Let's go back and let's search for just personal finance.
Lots more views on these videos.
When you get to personal finance what I also do is just search for channels instead of videos to see
what types of channels there are.
What I've actually personally heard is that personal finance is an area on YouTube that is underserved.
That's something I've heard through some other research.
So that's partly why I think YouTube does need some more personal finance channels.
But I don't think again that personal finance for millennials is a great idea.
Lastly let's go over to Facebook.
Search for personal finance for millennials know groups and I'm searching for groups because that will
tell me.
Are people interested in this topic let's just search for personal finance like we always do groups.
Lots of groups lots of groups with lots of members and investing groups personal budgeting groups lots
of different groups here about personal finance.
So at this saaf allegation tells me is that personal finance might be a good idea for a company but
not necessarily geared at quote unquote millennials because that leaves out a lot of people who might
be interested in my business or services.
So let's move on to hard validation which is a little bit different.
This will give you an even better idea if your business is valid with hard validation.
I'm talkin about cold calling people sending out surveys sending out emails to people and literally
asking them either one.
Is this a good idea or asking them what they want from you.
If you are able to build up a reputation on Facebook or on social media if you have any sort of e-mail
list you can ask the audience or your audience what they're looking for.
You can also post surveys online find social media groups related to that topic.
For example personal finance and put up a survey Use Survey Monkey dot com or Google Forms to quickly
and easily create surveys that you can just share online to get feedback.
This could be just about your business itself or about a specific part of your business.
A specific service that you're going to provide and that's what I've done with my audience right now
because we put out a lot of online courses and media.
And so we'll ask our audience what courses do you want.
What videos do you want.
What types of social media posts do you want what types of podcasts blog articles do you want in in
the next lesson.
I show you an actual example of a survey that I sent out including all the survey copy the results we
got.
And it shows you exactly why sending out surveys can be so powerful.
So these are two very easy ways to do market research.
You could take an entire class about actually doing market research and that would take many hours.
But if you want to just get started and jump right in.
These are a few ways that you can get started today.