I see a painfully large amount of people waste their lives on stupid business ideas. We all have…
A friend gets giddy over some new venture he thought up after reading the daily newspaper for the first time in years. He runs around telling EVERYBODY how GREAT their lives will be after their product has hit the market.
My friend Neville calls these people “Wantrepreneurs”. They spend THOUSANDS of dollars and YEARS of their lives trying to fool themselves into believing they’re entrepreneurs. They will get business cards, make Facebook pages, start Tweeting constantly, file for an LLC, open bank accounts…TONS of GARBAGE!
Don’t Be a Wantrepreneur!
Luckily for you, you are reading this blog and won’t be subject to the Wantrepreneur’s agony.
It is extremely easy to prove to yourself your business is a failure or a success with just a couple hours of effort. And it works for almost any idea.
Let me show you exactly what I do to validate business ideas for FREE…
Step 1 – Create a Landing Page
The first thing we are going to do is make a landing page for our business idea (as if it is already an established business).
I use Unbounce (FREE) to create all of my idea validation landing pages. Once you have an account and get familiar with it, it is very easy to use.
I will post a recent landing page I put up to validate a business idea. Or I should say, realize my business idea was incredibly stupid, and not at all worth pursuing.
My recent validation test landing page
You can see, I don’t put much time into these landing pages. The goal is to get it up QUICK and make sure it is something that your target market would bite at.
I always take advantage of Unbounce’s A/B testing features when running validation tests, and you should too. Test different headlines, different copy, different features, different prices, different colors…I test everything!
Step 2 – Run an Adwords Campaign
Now head over to Google Adwords with a $100 Coupon. If you don’t have one, you can get one from me here.
Make a new account and load up your Coupon. Go through the process to set up a new campaign and be sure to try to hit your target demographic as much as possible. Set your bidding option to Automatic Bidding to Maximize Clicks, with a max big target of $0.50. Put your budget around $20/day. Setting up a good Adwords campaign is obviously much more in depth than this, but we are going purely for speed here, you don’t even know if your idea is good yet.
After you have your campaign set up, write some ads and throw some good keyword in the campaign. If you don’t know how to pick good keywords, please learn.
Here are my keywords from my verification campaign –
My keywords for the test ad campaign
NOTE – Don’t forget to set up Conversion Tracking, or else this whole thing will be useless! In Adwords, set up Conversions under the Tools and Analysis section of your account. Take that script and put it on the confirmation popup on your Unbounce pages. Also, submit an entry into your landing page to make sure all tracking and lead capturing is working properly! If you have any trouble doing this, comment below and I will post a follow up!
Step 3 – Find Out If You’re a Genius or an Idiot
Now you get to see what happens…
You will either start getting TONS of leads in your email, get a few leads, or get absolutely nothing. Be sure to contact your leads and find out as much as you can about them, they’re needs, etc. SELL THEM!
You will soon find out if you have a smashing hit or a complete dud on your hands. People could start throwing money at you, or they may start cursing you out.
You will also end up with something like this after a couple days –
Stats of my completed validation test campaign
This will give you some additional numbers about customer acquisition costs for you to weigh against your revenue (or potential revenue).
Moving Forward
After running your tests and looking at all your data, you will have INFINITELY more perspective on if you want to move forward with your business idea; and if so, which direction to take it in.
And you did it all in a couple of days, for no cost but your time. Pretty nifty huh?
