How do you go about testing your business ideas? The answer is, “Fail Fast!” What does this mean and how do you succeed by failing?
1.The meaning of ‘failing fast’.
What is meant by ‘fail fast?’ Basically it means you need to test your business ideas quickly to see whether it’s viable before you misspend time, money, effort and energy on something that may not work. The last thing you want to be doing is designing logos, building websites, spending money, getting business cards printed, etc when you haven’t proven that the idea will be successful. You need to test your idea over a weekend. What you are doing in that space is playing at the business game and hiding from the possible negative outcome.
2.Testing Ideas.
Put your ideas up front and test the idea well before you invest in it. Be courageous and take this step. The first thing on the agenda is to formulate your business idea by writing it down on paper. Doesn’t matter what you are selling, write down your business idea to give you clarity on what you’re thinking.
Step two, depending where you are in the world, use Gumtree, Facebook marketplace, olx, Craigslist to advertise. Create an advert around what you're selling and publish it so that your target audience knows about you and can buy from you. Throw your ad up onto as many free advert platforms as possible, don’t spend any money even if you don’t have anything to sell.
Now it’s time to promote those ads wherever you can. Drive traffic to the ads that you post. You haven’t built a website yet, you don't even have an email address, it doesn't matter but use your network. Tell your friends, family, spread the news as much as you can on to drive people to advert as much as you. Identify how many enquiries you receive from that advert, how many people emailed saying they wanted to buy, how much interest did you get?
3.The outcome of this process.
Different advertising platforms provide you with some traffic stats. How many people visited that ad? Suddenly, you have an idea on whether the business is viable or not. Even if you have orders and you’re not ready to ship, email back saying, “wow, we’re overwhelmed. We’re sold out but you’ll be the first to know when we have new stock”. This is miles better, rather let a few people down than invest a great deal of resources into an idea that hasn’t been tested.
Remember; Fail fast to improve.
