Do You Have An Idea For A Service That You Want To Turn Into A Business?
But, you may be feeling self-doubt on whether this idea is profitable and whether or not you should pursue it?
You might be saying…
“My idea feels a little vague, what I should be offering as a service?”
“How do I know people will buy?”
“How do I talk about what I do so it resonates?”
“How do I build my reputation and credibility when I don’t have a client just yet?”
After working with hundreds of people starting their first businesses, I can tell you that there are major steps people miss all the time to validate their ideas and this causes them to have self-doubts, procrastinate on starting their dream business, and experience the ‘fraudy feelings’ on feeling credible to start!
In today’s video episode, I’m sharing the 3 Steps To Validate Your Ideas Before You Launch.
It’s time to get your business off the ground, develop your ideas properly so you can launch confidently, and a powerful approach to build credibility and experience, even if you have never had a paying customer before.
Start With What You Want
Yes that’s right. Get real selfish right now.
The purpose of starting a meaningful business is also to serve YOU. What do you really want to do with your idea?
Building a sustainable business that you’re excited to wake up for every morning requires you to actually enjoy your work.
How do you want to help and perform your service? Who do you want to work with and what specifically do you want to work on?
If you started with a general service, what specific areas do you want to specialize in?
It’s always better to be a Specialist than a Generalist.
Especially when you’re starting a business for the first time, it’s important to narrow down your idea to an area of deep interest not only for your benefit, but for the benefit of your customers to find you easily.
When you start to understand what You Want To Do vs. What I Think I Have To Do, you will have better boundaries on your work. You’re not here to solve everyone’s problem. The more specific you get in your niche, the more successful your business will become.
Use Real Market Research Through Conversations To Identify Problems
It’s important to validate your ideas before spending time, energy, and money to move it forward.
You want to be confident knowing that your idea is not only interesting for you, but it’s also something that people need.
So many people think they have to launch an idea secretly without help from others. Like we’re not allowed to start sharing our ideas before we ‘get it right’.
This is a big mistake that people make, because if you’re creating a business to serve, then you’ll need to learn HOW to serve your people!
You can get your ideal clients to help you build your idea if you start with an ‘Asking Campaign’. It can be as simple as curating a handful of individuals that represent the types of people you like to work with to start having real human conversations with them.
This way, you’re not having to guess about what to create to solve their problems – you can get it straight from the horse’s mouth!
The benefits of doing this direct market research is that you’re going to find out how your customers describe and speak about their problems (the real language you’ll want to put into your marketing), what they find valuable to get help on (what they’ll value and buy), and the core problems that are causing them pain (what you can create solutions for).
If you don’t have someone in your immediate network that fits for an interview, take a look at FB groups that host a community that your ideal client could be in. Take a look at this video I filmed on How to Use FB Groups to Validate Your Ideas & Find Clients.
Build Confidence and Credibility Through Testing First
Another big step that new business owners miss is taking the time to experiment and test their ideas before launching their business.
Beta testing your offer, service, or even a mini version of your service is so helpful in supporting you to feel confident about the work you want to charge for.
Of course you may have procrastinated on launching your business if you aren’t feeling confident in whether or not you can create immense value for other people!
Beta testing your service is like a self-made internship, where you have intentionally set up time and attention to work with real humans pre-launch.
It’s incredibly helpful to really see through the process of how you help people get results. It’s also immensely helpful to gain feedback to be able to refine and improve your offer before you announce it to the world.
But most importantly, how good will it feel to get early testimonials for your work?
This way, you can launch your tried, tested, and true offer to your audience with confidence. You’ll have ‘proof in the pudding’. Using your beta test experience, you’ll feel credible and your gained testimonials will help you in building trust with your work with a new audience!
