How to Validate Your Business Ideas

Early Stage Startups Invest >3,000 hours doing

Customer Discovery to Validate their Business Ideas

Learn these 3 lessons to start validating yours:

1/ How to make hypotheses and

2/ Ask open-ended questions to

3/ Obtain all the information you need.

1/ Everything begins with a guess, or in this case a hypothesis.

- Is your customer even the right customer?

- Is the problem you want to solve even a problem?

- Is the problem big enough?

- Are there unsolved needs you can cover?

- What´s the sense of urgency?

Guesses have a trick, the answer to the guess is not obvious:

- Entrepreneurs want more customers

- Researchers want a faster response time

- Program Managers don´t want to pay extra hours

- Facility managers want something that is cheaper

As an example, I have a time management tool and I want to validate:

• If my potential customer is even a customer
• If there´s any urgency to solve the problem
• If they care and by how much
• If they are the decision maker
• If there´s even a problem

Once you create your hypotheses,

The questions you ask will help you

Find gaps and needs of your customer

To validate the potential of your business idea.

2/How to Ask Open-Ended Questions

If you ask: Do you use time management tools?

Whether the answer is yes or no,

The conversation is over.

The same happens if you ask:

Would you buy my product?

Most people will be polite and say yes to avoid hurting your feelings, but they will not buy.

If Instead, you ask:

- What tools do you have to measure time management?

- What are some time management tools previously used in your organization?

- What do you like about them? / What do you dislike about them?

- How do you differentiate good time management tools from bad ones?

- Who is involved in your organization to decide which TMT to use?

You can obtain information about your potential customer preferences, environment, relationships, and more.

3/ Obtain all the information you need:

The beauty of Open-ended questions is that they allow the interviewee to expand on their thoughts.

You can guide the conversation to:

a)Create empathy and a trusting environment.

b)Obtain the data you need to validate your business idea.

An underrated hack: Avoid Selling.

We like buying, but we don´t like being sold.

A good sign of your interview is when they speak 80% of the time and you only 20%

Your objective is to gather data, not to sell

That’s it!

3 simple ways to validate your business idea:

1/ Make hypotheses

2/ Ask open-ended questions

3/ Avoid Selling & Listen 80% of the time

Repeat this with 10+ customers to find patterns in problems and needs that you can solve.

If you are an:

Early-Stage Startup,

Founder,

Creator,

I´d love to listen to your Idea and help you with this process.