According to statistics published in 2019 by the Small Business Administration (SBA), about 20% of business startups fail in the first year. About half succumb to business failure within five years. By the 10th year, only about 33% survive.
While there are a lot of reasons that can result in a business failing, most times, the reasons small business fail is because they make the same mistakes and one of them being a lack of a market need for their product. In summary, if no one wants your product or service, you can not have a business.
But not to worry, this can easily be avoided by validating your business idea first. Idea validation is the process of gathering evidence around ideas through research and experimentation to make fast, informed and de-risked decisions. It’s a process that starts from an idea and typically ends with a paying customer.
The purpose of idea validation is to expose your idea to the realities of the real world before you actually launch your product/service.
This article highlights 5 free digital tools to help you easily validate your business idea. So, let’s get into it, shall we?
1) Google Trends
Most market/idea validation processes start with the same questions: “Are there enough people potentially to buy my product?” and “How big is the customer base?”
Well, there’s a simple tool to help you with that and that’s Google trends. “Google trends” allows you to search for search terms in real-time. This will allow you to see how many people are searching for specific terms on the Google platform.
All you have to is visit trends.google.com/ and search for words relating to the idea that you want to test out. This will give you a good approximation of how many people are in your potential market very quickly.
2) Typeform
Talking to potential customers and receiving unbiased feedback from the public can help you make better decisions. And using a survey or even a series of recurring surveys to monitor trends can give the confidence you need to move forward and grow your customer base.
A good tool to help with this is Typeform as it can build beautiful, mobile-ready forms that people love using. With its custom themes, online order forms, and conditional questions, Typeform is flexible—and you can test it for free.
3) ConvertKit
The next thing you want to do is to create a landing page. A landing page can help to clearly describe your product or service, with a specific call to action such as a ‘Sign up Now’ or ‘Buy Now’ button to gauge the interest of your consumers. The more leads you capture, the more validated your idea is.
Building a great looking landing page doesn’t have to be complicated, and with all of the templates ConvertKit allows you to choose from, things just got even easier. You do not need a website or a blog to create and share a landing page as ConvertKit can host the landing page for you.
You can watch my full video on how to create a landing page under 10 minutes using ConvertKit
4) Google keyword planner
Most people start with Google when they want to find something, so having a tool that tells you what people are searching can help you build your product and strategically get it to the face of your customers.
With that said, the Google Keyword Planner tool can help you assess the demand based on the search volume of a certain product. With information like this in your power, you can decide if you still want to continue to proceed with your business idea.
5) BuzzSumo
One of the easiest ways to validate an idea is to see what your competitors are doing. If your service is heavy on content then BuzzSumo is definitely for you! Instead of posting an article and hoping for the best, you can let others in your niche validate a blog idea for you.
Buzzsumo is a popular tool for content marketers, because of its ability to analyze and report on both your own and your competitor’s content performance. With Buzzsumo, you’ll actually be able to see what content is performing well based on the number of shares it receives.
There you have it! Idea validation is the easiest way to minimize the risk of implementing ideas no one wants or isn’t willing to pay for.
To know how to test your business idea with real customers, you can watch my YouTube video on how to identify real customers that will pay you.