No matter if you’re starting a new business or exploring a new business branch, it is always difficult to prove the investment with predicted results.
Why start if the result is unknown?
This is when most entrepreneurs start careful consideration and planning to prove a new beginning is not a waste of time and money.
The truth is, the result is always unknown.
Sometimes even polished business plans fail if they don’t find a market fit. It is also true that the most successful businesses start with innovation, which paves the roads that were never reached. So how do you know your next business is something the world wants and is ready to pay for?
Once you’ve done market and competitor research, try a few approaches to see if the idea is a viable business model. Here are some of them.
Table of Contents
1. Proof of Concept (POC)
POC is a simple project that validates an idea. It shows if the business model can be developed in conditions that won’t consume excessive resources or time.
POC exists to estimate the core of your future digital product and help you visualize the functionality. The result of a POC should be a structured proposal with essential features, benefits, timelines, costs, success criteria, and resources.
While building a POC, you need to follow such steps:
- Collect a list of audience pain points. Try interviews, competitor research, and existing solutions to see how your idea wins among others.
- Define your own possible solutions. Create a few options of how your final product should look like and ask for feedback from potential users. Don’t forget about costs, timeline, and overall support.
- Build a POC. Once you’ve got the first feedback, work on a theoretical demonstration of the product.
You can repeat the testing a couple of times to finalize the idea. To truly put your new business idea to the test, select at least 50 potential customers or clients carefully and talk through the project one by one.
Best fit for the POC: identify the technical flaws, see if the idea is viable, and build the structure for the future development process.
2. Prototype
One of the best ways to prove the idea is to test it as early as possible. Prototype is a simulation or sample version of a final product. It is an interactive, working visualization in design, responsive and clickable.
Examples of a prototype are:
- Mockup – the visual presentation of the product built in Adobe XD or any other design tool.
- Paper Prototype – as the name says, the scheme with functionality on paper. It is the best way for non-technical people to present the idea.
- Storyboard – this approach is great to present the idea in story when steps and sequence matter.
- Wireframe – illustrations and schematics that show the way an idea should work to find the best design solution and architecture for your product.
The goal of a prototype is to make sure the product is ready for development and thus, full investment. Prototypes are essential for checking if the product, website, or app works in the way it was meant to. It also helps to identify the user’s pain points.
Once the prototype is built, the team can conduct usability testing and see how users interact with it. For example:
- Do users follow the flow the way it was built?
- Do users stumble upon certain touchpoints?
- How long does it take to finish the basic user flow?
- Are there any wordings and screens that are redundant or users feel uncomfortable with?
After usability sessions, the team can optimize the user experience based on the feedback that was received. Prototype can take days to develop – so let’s say if the idea fails, it is easy and not expensive to build a new version and test it again. Sounds amazing, right?
Prototypes can be developed in low-fidelity and high-fidelity levels of detail. Low-fidelity is a simple black & white option with basic functionality, while high-fidelity is the nearest option to the final design. So the main idea here is to test the product idea at any stage: whether it’s a very raw interface to test or a developed idea to see how users interact with the design.
Best fit for the prototype: identify the flaws of the idea at the earliest stages and decide on the best solution to make the idea work.
3. Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
Let’s say you’ve built a prototype, conducted a few user tests, optimized the flows. Are you ready to build the full version of a product? Probably.
Or not?
You can simply test the very basic implementation of your business model and see if it finds success on the market. MVP is a great way to see if it works as it is the simplest form of your idea that can be sold as a product.
You can try to invest small and test your idea with:
Chatbot
A chatbot is a computer software program that simulates human conversation. Yet, it’s not just for answering user questions in chat. The chatbot can be coded to perform any tasks: generate reports, build a profile, accept payments, and so on. It doesn’t require a long design process or difficult coding to go live.
The best benefit of a chatbot is its presence on any possible digital platforms: website, social media, search engines, etc. With a chatbot, you can test the idea in any place where your potential customers are. How do you start with a chatbot? Chatbot development process can include various steps depending on how difficult the idea is, but usually building a chatbot takes days or weeks.
No-code tools
To see if the product has a market fit, you can use flexible no-code tools. This way, you can save money on development and go with the idea live. With a no-code tool, you can build the product in days or weeks.
Such platforms help to build responsive websites or mobile apps with the styling and integrations that you need. They are not the best idea for the final product but are great for testing the idea before scaling.
Simple landing pages
When the idea is built with a chatbot or a no-code tool, it’s time to think about promotion. While beautifully designed websites drive massive conversions, you can start with a simple one-pager with a direct offer to promote the idea.
The landing page can be your additional source on collecting user data, like how many people converted? How do they interact with the website: bounce rate, average session duration, scroll depth? With a simple landing page, you can test the positioning and understand if your product has all the features customers are looking for.
Final thoughts
Proof of Concept, Prototype, and Minimum Viable Project are structured ways to plan the check the idea before going live. No matter what approach you choose, try to adopt an experimentation mindset with your next business idea.
Entrepreneurs are afraid to fail. But instead of avoiding, go ahead and properly test a product idea before launching it. This is when mistakes become a source for more ideas, perhaps, even better than the initial one. While these approaches do not require large budgets or time, you can easily test different solutions and pick the one that wins
