Six steps to test a business idea | 123-reg

In this new Swift 6 video Nick Leech, Group Marketing Director at 123-reg, once again provides six valuable tips, this time for testing your business idea.

The first step is to present your idea to others and see if it sounds as good to them as it does to you. And by others we refer not only to your friends and family (who, unfortunately, tend to be impartial), but also to groups of strangers. The more these strangers belong to your target market, the better. A favourable context to expose your business idea to others is within an industry event, such as an exhibition or a conference. Attend one such event and speak to as many people -- both sellers and buyers -- as you can and get some feedback based on which you can extract the conclusion whether the idea is good or not.

A second step for testing a business idea resides in conducting a wider, quantitative market research through tools such as Google Consumers' Survey or SurveyMonkey. These instruments will enable you -- against a fee that is worth paying -- to get statistically reliable data regarding whether consumers and businesses would be interested in your product/service or not.

And since you are at surveying potential customers, a third measure to take in order to test the value of your business idea is to address the right questions. Aim for more detailed interrogations, which will yield relevant information to your product or service.

Examples of such targeted questions are: 'How much would people be willing to pay for this product/service?', 'Would they trust my business to deliver that service?', 'Do they actually just want to buy it from a big provider?' A very efficient tool in this respect is Google Trends. This returns important results on aspects such as whether your product or service is viable or not, the newly emerging niches in which they would be in demand and how competitive they are.

The fourth step of our present series is to study the persons and businesses in your market that offer products or services similar to those you intend to deliver. Identify their key points of difference and try to settle your own. Unless you have a really unique business idea, you will need to find a new way of doing what your competitors do. Examples of such competitive advantages include offering new levels of service, cheaper prices or providing the product/service in particular geographical areas.

A fifth stage in testing your business idea implies refining it. Receive the feedback from your friends, family and persons to whom you have exposed your business idea, analyse the data from the surveys and use all this in order to modify and adjust your initial idea.

The last step in this Swift 6 series is to determine whether you keep the idea or you give up on it. If it doesn't pass the earlier stages, you need to drop it and search for new ones. It is a natural thing to do as entrepreneurs have several ideas before discovering an efficient one.

More interesting insights into enhancing one's business ideas are in store so follow our 123-reg Swift 6 series!