ESYB2 007 - Validating Business Ideas
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[00:00:00] Now, let's talk about how to actually cheaply test and actually start your business quickly because getting feedback is fantastic, research is fantastic, but those are theoretical. They have limits in what they can achieve because some answers you only get in real life, real world. Plus, it's really easy to falsely think that an idea is good after getting feedback because a lot of people will kind of say, Oh, it's nice, it's pretty good.

And even though if you were objective, it will be easy to see through that. But since you're subjective, it's your idea, it's your business, you want it to succeed, you want it to be amazing. Errors can creep in, in overestimating how good this idea is. So there should be a couple of things on your list to do next.

One thing to do next is to prove yourself to yourself as an entrepreneur. What do I mean by that? Sometimes we imagine ourselves in the future doing amazing things. But it's easy to imagine. A really good example of that is when I go shopping [00:01:00] for groceries, and I look at the vegetables, and I look at the dessert.

The me that's imagining is thinking, Oh, I'm going to eat vegetables, I'm going to eat super healthy, and then, you know, the first thing I go and eat is like dessert when I get home. And then I think next time I'll fix this and the next time the same thing happens and this cycle happens for years. So you see the imagination is theoretical, but then you have to prove yourself to yourself and a lot of entrepreneurs They have a hard time being very accurate in this again because they want the business to do well they're subjective but a part of proving yourself to yourself is starting early And even if you don't do well early as an entrepreneur, this actually gives you a chance to improve yourself as an entrepreneur if you start early.

You want to test a small version of your idea in the real world. There's a very common saying, fail fast. It means that it's better to try and learn rapidly, and then try and try and try and try. A lot [00:02:00] of little failures will actually identify what does work. By trying. See, this is all non theory. This is all trying.

And cheap failure is much better than sitting on the sidelines. So, how do you try cheaply? Let's go over some different businesses and see what you can do in each kind. The hardest one is brick and mortar businesses like a restaurant, a gym. Sure, I can say a smaller version of a restaurant is a food truck, but that's not so satisfying if you want to start a restaurant.

And the challenge in that kind of a business is because it's so expensive to start, you really only get one shot. And because you only get one shot, you really need to learn the business of that business before getting into that business. And the way to do it is to get into management in that industry.

So, like, if you want to start your own restaurant, try to become a manager of a restaurant before that. I know it's a lot of work, but that's how you make yourself strong in that [00:03:00] industry before taking that big leap. And if you, let's say, want to start a gym, then that's Before opening a physical location, maybe you can do some outdoor exercise classes and see if you can run them, promote them.

This is also a part of testing yourself as an entrepreneur. Now also online, this is much easier. Let's say you want to do e commerce and you think you have some great designs in mind, or you want to sell products well. The expensive way is to go and buy a lot of inventory, which might hold you back because you might not have money to buy this inventory.

But today there are so many options like print on demand, where you can outsource the printing or. You can sell affiliate products, which don't require you to create products or have inventory. So you can just sell. This is basically getting into the game like today or this week. Sure, you might struggle, but you'll have next level things you're learning.

If you have an online idea, create a website and just go. And you can create a small website and build up incrementally, but then again, [00:04:00] same story, you're not sitting on the sidelines. Let's say you want to create video or content. Yes, sure, you can get a lot of equipment that's expensive, but at the same time you can start cheaply filming from your phone or your laptop.

It's not ideal, maybe, but you can start now. Want to create content? Take photos, start writing. This is a business you should start today or yesterday, right? Just to take it out of theory. Because sometimes if the idea is so simple that you can start it early and test it early by doing. Getting a lot of feedback actually becomes detrimental because you would have learned more about it and would have gained a better understanding of that business by just doing, because the cost of a lot of the business ideas online are just a couple of hundred dollars or even less than that, depending on what you can do yourself.

And let's say you don't even want to make a website, that's also possible. Think of all the marketplaces, like you want to sell Amazon, eBay, Etsy, you want to [00:05:00] create content, YouTube, podcasting, Udemy, those are all places where they do so many of the things for you, precisely so that you get off the sidelines and get into the business quickly, test the business, test yourself, make both better incrementally right away.

