So much of our success, motivation and momentum in business starts with having a high-demand, red-hot business idea.
On the other hand, many of you reading this right now fancy yourselves as savvy entrepreneurs who have ideas, but somehow need to make a call around which idea you will focus on and which one will catapult you into the levels of successful business owner.
You’ve no doubt been told to:
- Test your business ideas
- Research your target market
- Survey your market
- Run test campaigns
One of the challenges we’ve helped information product experts overcome in their businesses over at InfoMarketer’sZone is to move beyond “goodwill” toward practical spending.
Not many entrepreneurs have the stomach for this because it means you are putting your ideas “often your baby” on the line up-front to test for “over-the-top” commercial potential.
Let’s say you have an idea for a training course, an ebook or a consulting/coaching business and you want to assess the idea.
Instead of relying solely on market research and asking your customers if they would buy a $497 course from you on Topic X, why not follow that up with an offer to pre-buy that product now for $397 and receive it in 2-3 weeks?
Or, if pre-selling bothers you (selling something that is not yet finished), instead pre-sell your idea by selling a block of time (say 1-hour over the next week) which you will use to teach the material, coaching your customer after which you will have instant feedback on the course material that you can feed back into your product.
What you are doing is moving beyond non-commit feedback (which people will often provide but which often does not reflect the true picture of whether they would actually buy your product if it was available today) into the realm of testing the TRUE commercial value of the business idea.
While this test will often result in previously identified “good” ideas as questionable, better determine that early on versus having to figure it out 2-months from now when you have sunk much more time and investment in developing and launching your business.
