Starting a business has never been easier. With new tools, a business can be conceptualized and validated within minutes with little to no capital invested. After organizing four Start Norfolk weekends and working directly with the 13 Hatch companies, I know validating your idea can be done very quickly and very inexpensively.
There’s one main consistent feature: those founders who ask first and confirm their hypothesis are the most successful. I hear from a lot of entrepreneurs and wantreprenuers that it’s just too tough to find their first customer. I don’t agree, the Internet and the ability to move quicker than ever allows us to validate ideas in minutes, not months or years. To validate, according to Merriam Webster is to “illustrate the legitimacy.” I’ve seen hundreds of companies validating themselves in minutes or a couple of hours when they didn’t think it was possible before. Sometimes when I meet with clients I make them validate on the spot instead of telling me their “ideas.”
So how can you validate? Carry Norfolk started with just a pen and paper along with its founder’s cellphone. Ian Taylor, founder of Carry Norfolk, was a bicycle rider and loved meeting new people. He wondered if he could start a company by delivering their desires via bicycle. Taylor had no idea if people would pay for food or supplies to be delivered, so at Start Norfolk 3, he went from person to person and handed them a sheet of paper that said, “need supplies, coffee or Taco Bell? Call this number and I will deliver for five bucks.” When the weekend was over, more than $250 worth of orders were made and Taylor knew his bicycle delivery company had wheels. Almost a year later, Carry Norfolk is still delivering via bike with more than 15 riders and will soon hit more than 100 orders daily. #CellPhoneStartup
Another option is through a landing page with an email capture. Instead of physically coding or designing a website, there are several service companies that allow you to push a cookie cutter website in seconds to quickly inform potential users and collect a data point, such as an email. Let’s say you wanted to create a job board site and didn’t know where to start. Do you know if anyone would use your business? What makes yours unique? Using a templated site like LaunchRock will allow you to display text and a Call-To-Action attempting to collect an email.
In this case, you will want to offer something in return, this could be a discount, early access or some form of tutorial. Or just use something like, “Simply, give us your email and we will send you early access once we launch.” Once you push this, peruse sites and promote. If no one submits their email, try a different combination of words or this is validation that no one wants your product. The goal of validation is to produce the least amount for the highest return. Why would you build for years to find out no one wants what you are building? Fail, Fail fast and move on to the next.
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