Often there can be significant differences between our perceptions of what our customers want, and what our customers truly want. Gut and Instinct are often poor predictors of actual consumer demand, as are the encouraging words of our close friends and family. Before you invest significant time, energy and money into developing a product, it is essential that you actually test if people will buy what you are creating.
Advice from the Masters – Test Marketing
Saying they will buy is not the same as actually Buying
Don’t use intuition: The moral is that intuition and experience are poor predictors of which products and businesses will be profitable.
Intent vs action: To get an accurate indicator of commercial viability, don’t ask people if they would buy – ask them to buy. There is a large difference between intent and action.
Tim Ferris – Author – 4-hour workweek / Tools of Titans / Tribe of Mentors
Saying is not the same as paying! You’ll never have real market verification until customers give you their money for your product.
Lack of market verification; saying is not the same as paying!: You’ll never have real market verification until customers give you their money for your product.
Why should you develop products or services that customers won’t buy? Why should you risk creating a non-profitable business?
One of the major mistakes early stage startups often make is not seeing the difference between customer talk and action. What your customers say and what they eventually do is far not always the same.
Donatas Donikar – Author – Start-up Evolution Curve
Use Minimum Viable Products to Test your Idea
Minimum viable product (MVP) is a version of a new product that allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least amount of effort (Eric Ries, 2011).
Main reasons why most startups fail: they build products nobody wants to buy.
Validate the price of the solution you intend to deliver: One of the cheapest and most effective experiments is to try and sell your product online even if you don’t have a product yet! Create a website, upload design mockups of your product to eBay or any other platform, create a Kickstarter campaign, drive traffic to this offer, and check how many visitors will add your product to the cart. Once they click to “add to cart” or “buy now,” you can politely make an excuse and explain that product is currently unavailable. You could even suggest potential customers leave their email address if they would like to be notified once the product is available.
Donatas Donikar – Author – Start-up Evolution Curve
Learn how to validate an idea with as little time and financial investment as possible. Do you have a plan to validate your ideas cheaply?
Perfect is the enemy of shipped. Creating the perfect feature indicates making lots of assumptions without gathering user feedback and data, and will take significantly more time. Are you continuing to work on features that are polished enough to put in front of a few customers now and get feedback?
Cliff Lerner – Tech Entrepreneur / Author – Explosive Growth
Top Books on Test Marketing
The 7 Day Startup: You Don’t Learn Until You Launch
Authors: Dan Norris,Rob Walling
If you want to start your venture but you’re tired of repeated failures, Dan Norris’s The 7 Day Start Up was made just for you. This isn’t an ordinary book repeating the extraordinary success stories of the likes of Jobs and Gates. Instead it is a practical, real guide on launching a product that will become a market hit in 7 days.
Put Your Dream to the Test: 10 Questions That Will Help You See It and Seize It
Authors: John C. Maxwell,
10 powerful questions. Life-changing advice. 10 fulfilling answers. Dr. Maxwell’s Put Your Dream to the Test provides practical guidance on how you can turn your dreams into reality.
The Mom Test: How to talk to customers & learn if your business is a good idea when everyone is lying to you
Authors: Rob Fitzpatrick,
Questionnaires and surveys are filled with lies — you’d rather ask your Mom about your product than waste your resources by asking consumers. Unless, you find the right way to do it. In Mom Test, Rob Fitzpatrick shares the Dos and Don’ts of building strong consumer relationships, and most importantly, how you can detect their lies.
Other concepts on Entrepreneurship
1000 True Fans
‘1000 true fans’ is a concept that explains why it is not essential to be famous and have a huge following to earn a successful living working on your passion. In fact, all you need are a much smaller set of passionate fans (1000 for example), who become your marketing evangelists and core customers.
Execution
Everybody has great ideas, but it is only a few that can actually act on a good idea and turn it into a viable business. The execution of an idea is often much more important than the idea itself. To succeed as an entrepreneur, it is vital that you and your team have the ability to execute.
Your team
Your business is only going to be as good as the people who run it. All successful entrepreneurs know that putting together the right team of professionals is one of the most critical steps for any businesses success, while newbie entrepreneurs often try to do it largely alone. Learn to surround yourself with superstars, and you are sure to succeed in any endeavor.
TIM – Time Income Mobility
While the vast majority of people chase money, the ‘new rich’ have learnt the value of finding an optimal balance of TIM (Time, Income & Mobility) instead. There are 2 major advantages of focusing on TIM – (1) Having time and location flexibility, can lead to your money being worth a lot more (2) Time and Location independence can lead to happiness and content, which money simply can’t buy.