Steps to Test Your Business Idea

I see a painfully large amount of people waste their lives on stupid business ideas. We all have…

A friend gets giddy over some new venture he thought up after reading the daily newspaper for the first time in years. He runs around telling EVERYBODY how GREAT their lives will be after their product has hit the market.

Me and Kyle call these people “Wantrepreneurs”. They spend THOUSANDS of dollars and YEARS of their lives trying to fool themselves into believing they’re entrepreneurs. They get business cards, make Facebook pages, start Tweeting constantly, file for an LLC, open bank accounts…TONS of GARBAGE!

Don’t Be a Wantrepreneur!

Luckily for you, you are reading StartupBros and won’t be subject to the Wantrepreneur’s agony…

It is extremely easy to prove to yourself your business is a failure or a success with just a couple hours of effort. And it works for almost any idea.

Let me show you exactly how we validate our business ideas for FREE…

Step 1 – Create a Landing Page

The first thing we are going to do is make a landing page for our business idea (as if it is already an established business).

I use Unbounce (FREE) (Update: I now use LeadPages instead of Unbounce for this) to create all of my idea validation landing pages. Once you have an account and get familiar with it, it is very easy to use.

(Note – Unbounce now requires a credit card for their 30 day trial, so you will have to remember to cancel after your done testing)

If you don’t like Unbounce, you can also use Google Analytics Content Testing for free, but you will need to host your own landing pages/site. I highly suggest Unbounce for these types of tests.

Here is one of the best performing landing pages we used to validate and test StartupBros…

Step 2 – Run an Adwords Campaign

Now head over to Google Adwords with a Coupon.

If you need a hookup, I got you covered… Google is running a promotion for $75 in free ads when you spend $25, you can check it out here.

Make a new account and load up your Coupon. Go through the process to set up a new campaign and be sure to try to hit your target demographic as much as possible. Set your bidding option to Automatic Bidding to Maximize Clicks, with a max big target of $0.50. If you don’t get any clicks, raise this up 0.25 every couple hours until you do. Put your budget around $20/day. Setting up a good Adwords campaign is obviously much more in depth than this, but we are going purely for speed here, you don’t even know if your idea is good yet.

After you have your campaign set up, write some ads and throw some good keywords in the campaign. If you don’t know how to pick good keywords then don’t worry too much for now. Keyword selection is an in-depth topic and I’ll walk you through the process of keyword selection in an upcoming post.

For now, check out the Google Keyword Tool and put a website similar to yours in the “Website” box. Then test some keywords that you’re thinking. Don’t be afraid to get specific with them. To get to the Keyword Tool go to www.google.com and type “Google Keyword Tool” and it’ll be the first thing that comes up (they’ve been moving the URL around recently so I didn’t want to give a link that would go bad tomorrow).

You can also run Facebook or LinkedIn ads for these types of tests (obviously), but I can’t hook you up with coupons for those

NOTE – Don’t forget to set up Conversion Tracking, or else this whole thing will be useless! In Adwords, set up Conversions under the Tools and Analysis section of your account. Take that script and put it on the confirmation popup on your Unbounce pages. Also, submit an entry into your landing page to make sure all tracking and lead capturing is working properly! If you have any trouble doing this, comment below and I will post a follow up!

Step 3 – Winner Winner Chicken Dinner! … or Try Again

Now you get to see what happens…

You will either start getting TONS of leads in your email, get a few leads, or get absolutely nothing. Be sure to contact your leads and find out as much as you can about them, their needs, etc. Start the sell!

You will soon find out if you have a smashing hit or a complete dud on your hands. People could start throwing money at you, or they may start cursing you out.

Moving Forward

After running your tests and looking at all your data, you will have INFINITELY more perspective on if you want to move forward with your business idea; and if so, which direction to take it in.

Start it now! It doesn’t take a lot of time and it has a very real possibility at changing your life for the better. You have pretty much zero to risk here – GET AT IT! 

For real – when in all of history has it been possible to test a business in a week for $25 and an hour or two of work? It’s absurd not to.

And you did it all in a couple of days, for no cost but your time. Pretty nifty huh?