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

All right. So we can share a couple of things that, uh, 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, uh, if you want to get better at this 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, sounds really interesting. Let me know. 'Cause 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 product's in. You ask them questions. You try to see, A, is this a real problem for them? Uh, B, how big of a problem is it? Like, dude, this is the biggest issue in my life right now. Or, uh, it's nice to have. And you can suss that out by trying to figure out, okay, so what have you done to try to solve this? And if they don't really say anything, well then it's probably not actually that big of a problem. They haven't been trying to solve it. If they've tried like 8 solutions and none of it's working and they're just banging their head against the wall, you know it's a real problem. Um, 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, cuz 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 XYZ. Um, are you interested in trying it? And then they say yes. And you say, great. And then you make them pay some price, whether it's literally pay 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 weekend. We just talked about the basketball camp thing that Sean did. You told me what the idea was and he goes, if you're, if this interests you, Venmo me $1,800 right now. And we all did. And there was no website, there was nothing. It was just a phone call, a text. Twitter thing. And that's the way I typically do things. Oftentimes it'll take maybe 20 or 30 calls, uh, and I can probably get one person to show interest, but that's where a lot of people fail is they actually don't talk to enough people. Um, so for my latest thing, I've actually talked to like 300 people and, um, 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, well, how many talked to you? Like, well, we talked to like one person last week and then a person the week before. I'm like, Oh dude, it's gotta be from like 8:00 AM to like 7:00 PM and you're on calls all day. Um, 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-validated idea. So you take an idea that's already working and you just put, uh, 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, the, the validation point that way. I actually think 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 100%. 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, cuz if you're the customer for it, I guarantee you on an internet scale that there are at least another 100,000 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 10 other people that have that problem. Almost always there's a huge group.

HubSpot, grow better. And there's sometimes, or a lot of times, like let's say like HubSpot or some type 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. And that definitely exists. And there's this company that I talked to called Zooper, Z-U-P-E-R.co. And 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 electricians who work for you, they go out and they, it's like timetables 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 kind of interned 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. They 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 of I collected money, but I knew with a 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 6 months to get my first customer. And I know another guy who did that. Al from Next 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 6 months to learn exactly how they do things. So I knew very specifically the software that I was building, how it was gonna solve a problem. And so I didn't validate it in the sense of I collected money, but like I validated it in my mind of I had a higher degree of certainty.

So to summarize, 3 ways that you can validate your ideas. The worst way, or the sort of least fidelity way, uh, go talk to as many customers as you can, go 9 to 5, 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, uh, 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, um, you know, you're not guessing, do, is this problem real or not? Cuz you know it's real.

And all of these take a lot of courage. A lot of people don't do 'em because they're afraid. Everyone's afraid. You just gotta do it. Uh, and you can get done, you can get a lot done by just having some courage and actually following these steps. So. That's One Question Friday.