Many current and prospective entrepreneurs have numerous business ideas or products that they want to bring to market but aren’t sure if they’re going to work.
On today’s Black Entrepreneur Blueprint podcast episode # 453, Jay gives you three ways to test your business idea without spending a lot of money.
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BLACK ENTREPRENEUR BLUEPRINT SHOW NOTES – EPISODE # 453
In order to test your business idea or product idea, you need to create a prototype or a minimum-viable product. For physical products it can be a mockup or prototype – for services, create an offer for the service.
1 Make Sales
Making a few sales is the first and arguably best way to validate your product. There is nothing more important than customers seeing your product’s value and exchanging money for it. Until people pay you, your business is nothing more than a collection of assumptions. Getting to know potential customers is essential, but you can’t build your business until people pay you. Example of a physical product: is my nootropic. Example for services: create an offer for your services and see who pays.
Note: You can also start by selling other people’s products or services that already exist and replace them with yours once you have proof of concept (affiliate sales or reselling).
Example for physical products: using the nootropic example, I could go on clickbank.com and find a similar product and market that product as an affiliate. If the product sells, you create your own product in that space and sell your product instead of the affiliate offer.
Example for services: if you build websites and you work a full-time job and are testing out the idea, you can subcontract out the work and act as the project manager between your customer and the actual web designer. Once you get sales and you know it works, then you could start building the sites if you want to.
2 Create A Beta Group
Get a group of people to test your product or service at a discount or free to get feedback. You can also charge people to be in your group and make money while learning what people want. You can place ads on social media to join the beta group and lay out the conditions and rules of the group. If you do coaching or create online courses this is a great way to create the content people want and need. Example: Brand Builder Academy which turned into the program BBA Elite
3 Quiz Your Audience
Identify your target audience and have them take a short quiz and ask them what they want and need from a product like yours. Do this by using quiz software and posting on social media or to your database (if you have one)
