​How to validate ANY business idea before building (and wasting time and money on it)

Experienced Founder/ CEO here.

My team and I have bootstrapped an education company from 5k to nearly $1M revenue in 2 years.
But I’ve had some other business ideas that failed BIG time.

This is what this post is about and how to avoid that failure.

So, I did try SaaS, even Dropshipping, Amazon FBA, and more. ALL failed.

And i hope this post helps you to not do the same mistakes that i did when i asked myself “what online business can i start?”

I’ve failed not because these models or ideas of business don’t work – but because I’ve never actually VALIDATED if there is actually real demand for this.

I call this the classic rookie mistake for first time founders.
And I’ve fallen into the trap multiple times tbh. (5x to be exact!)

I’ve never talked to real breathing human beings one-to-one if they really needed this and would spend money on it.

So I’ve blew money that i did not have, a lot of time and energy into a thing that i’ve build – but – surprise, surprise -nobody wanted it.

However is reading this thinking about starting something new I truthfully hope this will not happen to you – now you know this pitfall!

So what can we learn from this?
Whatever business model or market you pick, make sure you validate first.

Validation is just a fancy word for making sure people are interested in something(your product/service) – before your building your product/service.

Let me say this again:

Validate First.
Build Second

And we want to validate CHEAP and FAST.

ok, but how we do that?

Here’s what the smart people do:

Before spending a single dollar, create what I call a “Smoke Test“

When plumbers fix pipes, they pump smoke through them first.

If there’s a leak, you’ll see the smoke before any water damage happens. – Easy.

And in business, it’s the same concept:

You’re testing for “leaks” in your business idea before pouring in real money (water)

Example:
Let’s say you wanna do a premium coffee delivery subscription service. Ok Great.

Instead of buying inventory and spending your 5k right away, you create a simple landing page that says
“Rare Premium Coffee Beans Delivered Monthly to you home – Join the Waitlist “

There are 2 ways to do that:

You Spend Money:
Now run $50 worth of Facebook ads to your target audience. (paid)

If your don’t want to spend any money – you have to spend time.

You Spend Time:
find your people online and tell them something like “hi, i’m thinking about to start a monthly Rare Coffee Beans Delivery — would you be interested – join the waitinglist“

If 100 people view your page and nobody signs up – you’ve saved yourself $4,950. – happy days – good for you.

If 30-40 people join your waitlist – you’ve got proof of interest – and a business.

This is exactly what Dropbox did – they made a video showing their “product” before writing a single line of code. Or a more recent example is Elon Musk and his Cybertruck.

Dropbox collected 75,000+ email addresses overnight. (and they did not even wrote a single line of code yet)

Elon Musk collected idk how many emails + 100millions deposits of people overnight. (and he did not build a sigle truck yet)

That’s validation for true demand.

So all we do is simply and cheaply collect signs of interest before we get moving.

I feel like a lot pf people are missing this step.

Hope this is valuable to you! 🙂