One Question Friday: What Does It Mean To "Test Your Business Ideas"?

hey mi this is bernard from burn in germany my question is about testing your business ideas so i've heard a bunch of people on your podcast talk about this already and how it's part of what made them successful now i don't really understand what this means testing your business ideas the only thing i could think of is maybe running multiple ads and comparing the performance but beyond that i really don't know what to do so could you first of all tell me how you have seen this done successfully in the past and second all i can become better at it thank you alright the guy asked sean he said i hear you talk about testing ideas what does that mean does that mean just like running ads to like a page and getting sales and the answer is yes that is our way but he wants to know about testing ideas and how do you do that alright so we can share a couple of things that i think you talked about this in the last one question friday but the first is customer conversations and the mom test so the real there's a book called the mom test worth reading if you wanna get better at the stuff but here's the premise which is talk to customers and your the rule is don't make the mistake everybody does don't pitch your product and just wait for them to politely be like yeah it sounds is really interesting let me know because that's like a false positive you're only allowed to talk to them about their problem so you do what's called a problem interview you just talk to them about their life what they're you know in their business whatever whatever your area your products in you ask them questions you try to see a is this a real problem for them b how big of a problem is it like dude this is the biggest issue in my life right now or it's nice to have and you can su that out by trying to figure out okay so what have you done to try to solve this if they don't really say anything well then it's probably not actually that big problem they haven't been trying to solve it if they've tried like eight solutions and none of it's working and they're just banging in their head against the wall you know it's a real problem and so you try to figure out the problem you try to figure out how big of a problem and you try to figure out the words they use to describe it as a problem because that's what you're gonna use to create your solution and then separately you could say well i'm working on a way to solve that it'll be a x y z are you interested in trying it and then they say yes you say great and then you make them pay some price whether it's literally paid money or give give your information or connect your account so i can have your data or whatever make them do something that has some friction so you can gauge if they're really interested or not that's one way you could test an idea and that's exactly what you did this week weekend and we just talked about the basketball camp thing that sean did you told me what the idea is and he goes if you're if this interest to you v me eighteen hundred dollars right now and we all did and there was no website there was nothing it was just a phone call text twitter thing and that's the way i typically do things oftentimes it'll take maybe twenty or thirty calls and i can probably get one person to show interest but that's where a lot of people fail they actually don't talk to enough people so for my latest thing i've actually talked to like three hundred people and you have to talk to a lot of people i invested in this one company and they were trying to get customers and i'm like how many we talk you like well we talked to like one person last week and then a person will week before i'm like oh dude it's gotta be from like eight am to like seven pm and you're on calls all day and that's that that that that that way i think typically works but most people don't don't have enough intensity around it there's another way which is you take a a pre out validated idea so you take an idea that's already worked and you just put you change it in some way so oh it's working in the us but there's no version of this in europe it's there's a pretty good bet that the behaviors in the us are gonna translate to let's say europe or wherever and so you can skip the validation idea that the validation point that way i actually think i validating an idea is really really hard i actually don't think you're ever gonna get this clear signal that like yep check i know that people want this it's just like a spectrum you're just increasing your confidence level that there's a real there there but you're never at a hundred percent and until you you know many many months in too far in the second thing is another way to skip the line is just work on something where you know you're the customer because if you're the customer for it i guarantee you an internet scale that there are at least another hundred thousand people that are just like you that have the same problem as you that feel the same way you do you may not be able to find them you may not be able to market to them but they definitely exist and so one way to validate your idea is to just build something that solves a problem for you very rarely will that be too small where it's only you or only you and ten other people that have that problem almost always there's a huge group this data is wrong every freaking time have you heard of hubspot hubspot is a crm platform where everything is fully integrated well i can see the client's whole history calls support tickets emails and here's a test from three days ago i totally missed hotspot hubspot grow at them and there's sometimes times or a lot of times like let's say like hubspot or some of software like riverside what we're using now where it's like it's a little bit challenging to get customers before the thing is actually built now it definitely exists and there's this company that i talked to called z z u p e r dot c and look their headline is power your field service and deliver a better customer service basically it's an app where if you're an electrician all your electrician who work for they go out and they it's like timetable tables and all this stuff and he was like i was like how did you do this and he said well i just spent all my nights and weekends talking to these business owners and i basically kinda intern for them and i got to know them really well and i honed in on the problem very specifically and i got like pre commitments it didn't pay me but they told me if i can do x y and z they'll be my customer and so i didn't validate it in the sense if i collected money but i knew what the high degree of certainty what the problem was because i spent a year working with these people and talking to them and then when i built it it took about six months to get my first customer and i know another guy who did that a from ne health it's like a billion dollar company now and he did the same thing he built software for doctors and he goes i quit my job and i became a secretary at a doctor's office for six months to learn exactly how they do things so i knew very specifically the software that i was building how was gonna solve a problem and so i didn't validate it in the sense that i collected money but like i validated it in my mind of i had a higher degree of certainty so to summarize three ways that you can validate your ideas the worst way the sort of the least fidelity way go talk to as many customers you can go nine to five go shadow them try to talk to them about their problems figure out how big of a problem it is and what they do to solve it today the second you know a higher fidelity way you actually have an offer it's a landing page it's a it's an ad it's a flyer it's an email and you try to get people to pre commit to a solution that will also validate that there's demand to this and then the best way of all the ways is you know there's demand because you have the problem and if you have the problem you know it well you know what solution would work you have a place to test it you can be patient zero and you can test it on yourself and if you do all that you know you're not guessing do is this problem real or not because you know it's real and all of these take a lot of courage a lot of people don't do them because they're afraid everyone's afraid you just gotta do it and you can get done you can get a lot done by just having some courage in actually following these steps so that's one question friday