The entrepreneurs I mentor are an badass, gutsy, inspiring group of men and women. I love talking with them and working through the problems they have with their businesses.
Many of them experienced the same pitfall when starting up their business. It goes something like this:
“I have this great product idea, but in order to test it I need to set up an Instagram account, a Facebook page, and a web page. Then I have to get a Paypal account set up. And since I’m setting up a Paypal account I should probably set up a separate bank account for my business. And I also need this application installed, so I’ll do that and purchase a license. And it would probably help if I took this online course….”
Full stop. Arms waving wildly like an inflatable tube man. JUST. STOP.
Ideas are wonderful, glorious creatures. They seem pure and glowing and flawless, like a beautiful baby. Who hasn’t dreamed up a great business idea, doggedly certain it would burst onto the scene with a flash and immediately become a huge hit?
The problem is that your idea is beautiful to just one person: you. Ok, probably your mother too. So that’s two. I stand corrected.
Check Out – Laser Focus on the Upside
The second you expose your idea to people you think might be interested, things change quickly. They don’t understand it. Or they understand it but don’t want to buy it. Or it doesn’t solve their problem. Or the problem you thought they had wasn’t their real problem. Or the problem doesn’t really bother them enough to fork over cash for a solution.
It’s at this point when most self-proclaimed “Idea People” crumble and quit. You’ve heard of them, right? Oh, I’m just an idea guy. It would be nice if there was value in sitting on the couch with a bag of Cheetos and dreaming up ideas, but there isn’t. The value is in the hard, grinding work that has to be done to convert your Perfect Idea into a Working Business. Ideas are like dandelions: free, plentiful, and worth less than a bucketful of llama spit, as my grandmother used to say.
In order to create a working business, you must first validate your idea. That means you have to put an offer in front of potential customers to see if they’ll buy. An offer is simply a description of your product, including the mind-blowing value that will bring joy to your customer’s life and what it will cost them.
Once you come up with your idea, create an offer as soon as possible and get it in the hands of potential customers. Anything else you do between the genesis of your idea and launching your offer is a waste of time.
Think about it: do you really want to blow a ton of energy making a website, creating business cards, setting up a Facebook page and an Instagram account, etc only to find that no one gives a damn about your product?
Find out if your idea has value first, then build. Do only the bare minimum to validate it.
Check Out – Nosara: Beauty and Beasts
Think carefully about the shortest path to putting an offer in front of customers. Do you really need business cards? A website? A bank account? Do you really need to read more? Watch more? Talk about it more?
I get it. Putting an offer out there is scary. You open yourself to criticism by putting your baby in front of people. It’s going to be misunderstood, torn apart, and belittled. Worse, it may be ignored completely.
This is why it’s important to get to your offer as quickly and efficiently as possible. How quickly can you get feedback from your potential customers, learn from that feedback, launch a revised offer, and repeat? The cycle is brutal, slow, and hard on the ego, but until you put the offer out there, you learn nothing.
This is the key. You must learn as much as you can about your product quickly, and the only way to do that is to expose it to your intended customers. Don’t waste time building, reading, watching, or testing something won’t help you learn. Once you start learning what your market wants, your product will begin to evolve into something that people actually want to buy.
That’s when the fun starts.