You’ve had a brilliant idea: So would you like to see real customers buying it?

 

Do you want to validate the market before you go any further? To have all the market research and data that you need to guide your decision making quickly and cheaply?

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I know you’ve had great ideas before that go nowhere, and you’ve probably got all the books too.

 

Have you read that you need a Minimum Viable Product (MVP)?

 

Isn’t this going to take a lot of time and effort, before you even know if anybody cares?

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Actually, it’s not going to take much time and money at all. When you use the tools I’ve created for you, you’ll know for sure that you're backing a winner.

 

I’ll walk you through the simple process with my guide and supporting videos.

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Hey I’m Tom, and I’ve been where you are with a winning idea that I didn’t validate with real customers. I thought I knew better.

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I’ve wasted more time and money than I care to mention developing what I believed was the next big thing, paying for contractors on upwork and fiverr. I’ve met some fantastic people and developed some amazing products, but nothing that anybody wanted.

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When I left university I was keen to start a new business that would help students with budgeting. A friend of mine had developed a product similar to PayPal and we worked together to rebrand it for students and called it moola.

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The problem was that I thought I’d got all my ducks in a row. We had a product based on PayPal that people love, and I thought I knew what students want because I was one for 3 years.

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I read a couple of books that changed my thinking, Tim Ferriss’s ‘The 4-Hour Work Week’ and Russell Brunson’s DotComSecrets and there it was: I needed to test the market with real customers and I could do this quickly and easily before doing anything else.

 

Now I make sure all my decisions are based on facts, because this is what the data shows me.

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I’d been running an Airbnb for a while. When I became a superhost other hosts asked for my advice on their property listings which lead me to think about writing a guide… but this time I tested the market first before I wrote a word. I setup a Facebook advert and a Wix landing page.

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I ran the advert for a week with a simple landing page based on what I understood from Tim Ferriss’s book. Test One didn’t achieve sales because it lacked the information needed to structure the page correctly. I made some adjustments and the results are in Test Two: Success!

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Test One (7 Days, £280): 208 link clicks, Zero sales.

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Test Two (7 Days, £100): 66 landing page visits, 4 sales.

 

Four individuals were ready to buy a product that didn't exist, confirming interest and demand.

 

This valuable market research cost just £100 but yielded monumental returns— so I wrote the guide.

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I suddenly realised what I’d been doing wrong all the while. I asked the wrong questions and nobody corrected me. If you search the internet for ‘how to start a business’ you’ll find all the answers that are correct for starting a business, but you’re not at that stage yet. First you need to validate your idea.

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When I left MMU, I joined Innospace the universities incubator as I thought this would help with Moola. It didn’t. Then I believed I needed an accelerator, so I joined the one at Natwest. It didn’t help. I met people who could help with marketing and introductions which I thought made sense, but didn’t. Until you know there are customers for your idea, you are wasting your time.

 

The real problem is that you’re surrounded by people who don’t know how to validate an idea because they’ve never done it. They all have jobs and think like employees…they’re not entrepreneurs. The people in the incubator and the accelerator: Employees!

 

Once I realised this and applied it to my Airbnb guide, things really took off. I started by advertising a product that didn’t exist, but don’t worry I didn’t take anybody’s money. Knowing that I had customers before writing the guide made perfect sense. If there wasn’t any customers, I wouldn’t have needed to write it.

 

By thinking about your idea and how you advertise it to potential customers you have to describe it clearly and concisely. You’ll have heard of elevator pitches, pitch decks, having a great hook etc which may previously have been an after thought. Now they’re front and centre from the beginning.

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This is why I created the Don’t Start a Business Without Knowing You Have Customers which is a toolkit consisting of a guide and video tutorials.

 

I have spent so much time and effort doing what I believed was the way to launch my ideas into a successful business by creating the Minimum Viable Product (MVP), prototypes, Proof Of Concept (POC), paying contractors to create logos, develop software, setting up companies, paying accountants and it’s all been completely unnecessary.

 

Once I’d learned the expensive lesson that you need to know that you have customers before you invest too much time and effort I developed this toolkit. I trialed a number of website builders, and experimented with landing page formats to produce a formula that works.

 

The guide and video tutorials are easy to follow, there’s nothing overly complicated as it’s all straightforward.

 

It might take half a day to setup everything, and it takes as long as it takes to write around 1,000 words for the landing page. The tried and tested template that we use breaks the page down into sections making it clear what’s expected.

 

You will present your idea as if it exists so that your target audience can go through the buying process validating the market and proving demand.

 

The analytics record individual sessions so that you can see how real users react.

 

You’ll have the market research you need so that you’ll have confidence to invest more time and money.

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