I see a painfully large amount of people waste their lives on stupid business ideas. We all have…
A friend gets giddy over some new venture he thought up after reading the daily newspaper for the first time in years. He runs around telling EVERYBODY how GREAT their lives will be after their product has hit the market.
Me and Kyle call these people “Wantrepreneurs”. They spend THOUSANDS of dollars and YEARS of their lives trying to fool themselves into believing they’re entrepreneurs. They get business cards, make Facebook pages, start Tweeting constantly, file for an LLC, open bank accounts…TONS of GARBAGE!
Don’t Be a Wantrepreneur!
Luckily for you, you are reading StartupBros and won’t be subject to the Wantrepreneur’s agony…
It is extremely easy to prove to yourself your business is a failure or a success with just a couple hours of effort. And it works for almost any idea.
Let me show you exactly how we validate our business ideas for FREE…
Step 1 – Create a Landing Page
The first thing we are going to do is make a landing page for our business idea (as if it is already an established business).
I use Unbounce (FREE) to create all of my idea validation landing pages. Once you have an account and get familiar with it, it is very easy to use.
(Note – Unbounce now requires a credit card for their 30 day trial, so you will have to remember to cancel after your done testing)
If you dont like Unbounce, you can also use Google Analytics Content Testing for free, but you will need to host your own landing pages/site. I highly suggest Unbounce for these types of tests.
Here is one of the best performing landing pages we used to validate and test StartupBros…
A champion of scrappy landing pages…
You can see, I don’t put much time into these landing pages. The goal is to get it up QUICK and make sure it is something that your target market would bite at.
Here is a landing page we used to test different taglines with StartupBros – you will get 1 of 4 different taglines we were testing.
It’s important that you take advantage of Unbounce’s A/B testing features when running validation tests. Test different headlines, different copy, different features, different prices, different colors…I test everything!
Step 2 – Run an Adwords Campaign
Now head over to Google Adwords with a $100 Coupon.
If you need a certificate, StartupBros has you hooked up
$100 Adwords Certificate
Make a new account and load up your Coupon. Go through the process to set up a new campaign and be sure to try to hit your target demographic as much as possible. Set your bidding option to Automatic Bidding to Maximize Clicks, with a max big target of $0.50. If you don’t get any clicks, raise this up 0.25 every couple hours until you do. Put your budget around $20/day. Setting up a good Adwords campaign is obviously much more in depth than this, but we are going purely for speed here, you don’t even know if your idea is good yet.
After you have your campaign set up, write some ads and throw some good keywords in the campaign. If you don’t know how to pick good keywords then don’t worry too much for now. Keyword selection is an in-depth topic and I’ll walk you through the process of keyword selection in an upcoming post.
Your ad will show up in places like this
For now, check out the Google Keyword Tool and put a website similar to yours in the “Website” box. Then test some keywords that you’re thinking. Don’t be afraid to get specific with them. To get to the Keyword Tool go to www.google.com and type “Google Keyword Tool” and it’ll be the first thing that comes up (they’ve been moving the URL around recently so I didn’t want to give a link that would go bad tomorrow).
You can also run Facebook or LinkedIn ads for these types of tests (obviously), but I can’t hook you up with coupons for those 
NOTE -Â Don’t forget to set up Conversion Tracking, or else this whole thing will be useless! In Adwords, set up Conversions under the Tools and Analysis section of your account. Take that script and put it on the confirmation popup on your Unbounce pages. Also, submit an entry into your landing page to make sure all tracking and lead capturing is working properly! If you have any trouble doing this, comment below and I will post a follow up!
Step 3 – Winner Winner Chicken Dinner! … or Try Again
Now you get to see what happens…
You will either start getting TONS of leads in your email, get a few leads, or get absolutely nothing. Be sure to contact your leads and find out as much as you can about them, their needs, etc. Start the sell!
You will soon find out if you have a smashing hit or a complete dud on your hands. People could start throwing money at you, or they may start cursing you out.
After a couple days you’ll have something that looks like this:
This is actually from Facebook Ads but Google Adwords will look similar.
This will give you some additional numbers about customer acquisition costs for you to weigh against your revenue (or potential revenue). What copy worked well? What tone? Using this information you will be closer to determining the validity of your business.
Moving Forward
After running your tests and looking at all your data, you will have INFINITELY more perspective on if you want to move forward with your business idea; and if so, which direction to take it in.
Start it now! It doesn’t take a lot of time and it has a very real possibility at changing your life for the better. You have pretty much zero to risk here – GET AT IT!Â
For real – when in all of history has it been possible to test a business in a week for $25 and an hour or two of work? It’s absurd not to.
And you did it all in a couple of days, for no cost but your time. Pretty nifty huh?
Let us know how this is working for you! Are there extra details you’d like to know? Add anything and everything below in the comments!
Love it, going to do that RIGHT NOW! Thanks, bros!
HELL YES LORENZO! If nobody else does anything with this post it was worth it
Don’t stop! Keep on it!
This is fantastic information. I have a salon with few existing clients. Could you tell me how I could best use this information, or the concept of “CrowdSourcing”, to very inexpensively (free being even better until I have the “test” results) test advertisement or headline copy?
Thanks.
Hi Meena,
What do you want to test your headlines or copy on? If it is web-based (your website, landing page, etc.), it should be pretty easy. If not, it is still possible, but a little more difficult. Just give me a few more details and I’ll try to help you out.
Talk soon,
Will
Let us know how it goes too!
I like what you are saying Will. Can you add a share button so I can share with my students?
Of course Kelly, I will add one right away! Are you looking for an e-mail share, or something to share to anywhere?
Thank you. A fb share where I could choose which fb voice I use would be great. An email share would work too.
Thanks for the reply Kelly, Ill be adding that immediately…
You can disregard the email I hastily sent you
Love it!
Straight out of the four hour work week. I’ve used a similar approach to verifying 8 of my last business ideas. Currently pursuing 2 of them.
Awesome – then you know as well as I do how awesome this type of validation testing is! Imagine the amount of time and money you saved just by running those little tests.
I take it your web design company was one of the winning ideas?
Your template has a box that opens in the bottom right that has the default; “Your HTML-content goes here..”
Thanks a lot Mike – fixing it now. Appreciate the help.
Excellent advice, and thanks for making it practical. So many people get caught up in the first stage of starting a business — the stage wherein they over-think the business without actually doing anything with it to test the idea (as I’ve written here http://www.bizopy.com/2012/10/24/testing-business-ideas-the-kickstarter-principle/). Your tips will come in handy to counter this problem.
Great post Dane, I couldn’t agree with you more. 95% of aspiring entrepreneurs will sadly never get past the idea stage to the execution stage. As entrepreneurs, it is more valuable for us to FAIL FAST - it leads to quick learning and thus quick success!
I have been working on this idea for weeks, and was getting ready to buy about $10,000 worth of inventory, and take my idea to market. I came across this idea validation process from a reddit post, and am very thankful. I setup a placeholder site a few weeks ago, started working with suppliers, getting all my tax and business license info in place. Right now, it’s all getting paused, and am running a validation.
Thanks Bros!
The most awesome comment I’ve seen all month
Great article bros, I use a very similar approach with testing my ideas… quick, easy, measurable. Looking forward to reading more of your posts.
Thanks Ross, would love to hear about your experiences with this method sometime
Unrelated, can you tell me what plugin you used in WordPress for that “Stay In Touch” thing inside a WordPress post? I like the look of it.
That is one of my favorite plug-ins ever – OptinSkin, were using it for all in-content forms. It also allows for a/b testing of forms, all sorts of design and placement features, direct integration into email service, etc…
I highly suggest it! – http://startupbros.com/optinskin
That is OptinSkin
First time I ever heard of Unbounce. Sounds like a great service. And I like this blog already — I tweeted it: https://twitter.com/volomike.
Thanks a lot for the help Mike! Unbounce is awesome, my secret weapon for quick, high converting landing pages…
Thanks for the tweetage Mike! You are going to hace so much fun with Unbounce
I noticed at the end you said this approach would cost about $25, but that is the first time you mention costs. I’m just curious what part of this process is costing money?
Hi Ben,
Thanks for taking the time to comment.
The main costs in the beginning will be your samples, which depending on product will cost $25+ per sample (and I recommend getting 2-3 at least). You can usually flip those on eBay/Amazon/Etsy if they are good samples and make your money back.
Then you need to buy your first load of inventory, which again depending on product will be $200-750. Ideally you’ll have done good research and flip those within a month and then go back for a $500-2000 order, and just keep building from there.
Hope that helps!
Will
Very informative, thanks for the quick response! Is this strategy intended to be used injunction with your other article that discusses importing items from China?
Hey Ben, thanks for commenting! I didn’t write this with that intention, but you can use this in conjunction, and I certainly would!
Hope that helps,
Will
With unbounce, do you need a different credit card # every time you want to validate an idea? Or is it more of a one and done kinda thing?
Thanks for the blog, I love it!
Hi Chris,
Thanks a lot for reading and taking the time out to comment.
I usually try to do validation in a big spurt, so I’ll validate every top level thing about my new startup I need to (brand name, logo, tagline, etc). If it were me and I didn’t want to pay for Unbounce, I would try to do as many tests like that in a 30 day spurt as I could and then drop the subscription on day 29. You could do this on different cards to extend it. Unbounce is a great tool though, I pay for it now
Hope this helps,
Will
awesome response time! thanks for the advice. I cant wait to try it out with an idea I have. Keep the posts coming
No problem! Thanks again for commenting, keep us updated on your progress!
Great HOW TO and thanks for showcasing Unbounce. This is awesome! For all of you at an early stage and just trying to test a few ideas, contact our support team and they can set you up with a sweet longer-term deal.
Best Regards,
Rick Perreault, Unbounce CEO
Thanks for making Unbounce possible Rick, it has saved me an incalculable amount of time and money! A must have for any internet entrepreneur
Thanks for taking the time out to comment!
Will
good work
Thank you! Hope it helps at some point
Hi, i want to test 2 different domains for the same idea, therefore i would have xx.com and yy.com but the same launch/landing page, can i use Unbounce for that purpose too. Hope you understand what i mean.
Hi Frank,
Yes, you can definitely do that with Unbounce! Unbounce will let you use their domains on the Free Trial – you just need to change the Logo of the landing pages you test.
That’s actually what I talk about in this article! We chose http://www.StartupBros.com based on this type of testing.
Hope this helps,
Will
I don’t understand, is this basically making a simple website and seeing if people come to it, to try and see if it’s popular or not?
Sometimes I just need things explained differently, sorry to sound so thick!
Yep, you have it right Rachel! It’s all about building a simple landing page to see how much interest the idea will generate. That way, you can see if there’s a problem in your business model before dropping a bunch of time and money into it
Hope that explains it,
Will