Getting your customer to test your solution
Now it’s time to develop a minimum viable product of your proposed solution and testing it with the help of your customers.
You are required to continuously improve and reiterate your minimum viable product until you get an awesome product or service to sell and make money from it.
Launching first with a minimum viable product keeps your risk, exposure, and expense low (or nil). It gives you the license to test the waters and validate your ‘good enough’ product with your potential customers. It confirms whether your product can fully meet the requirements of your customers and for you to make money quickly.
Most importantly, it confirms or modifies your assumptions about your customers, their requirements and expectations of your product, and their ability and willingness to pay you your asking price.
Don’t undervalue yourself when pricing your minimum viable product.
A ‘good enough’ minimum viable product does not mean that it’s of poor quality. All elements of a quality product must still exist to fully gain peoples’ trust and confidence.
The reality is that no matter how well you think you know about your potential customers and what they require or expect from your final product, you can easily misjudge their requirements and end up wasting a lot of time, effort, and money.
In a post-mortem of more than 100 start-ups, CB Insights found that the number one cause of start-up failure (42% of the time) was “no market need.”
Many start-ups spent months or even years building a product before they found out that they were wrong in their assumptions: that someone was interested in their product and people who are willing and able to pay for it.
In testing your product and yourself, you may end up saying, “running a business (or selling a product) is not for me”. It’s OKAY to walk away from starting a business or making additional money knowing that you have given this a try.
You can validate your minimum viable product with your customers in established marketplaces.
If you have creative skills to sell, go to marketplaces like 99Designs, Behance, Coroflot, CrowdSpring, DesignCrowd, Dribbble, Fiverr, and Upwork
If you have technical skills to sell, go to marketplaces like Envato Studio, Fiverr, Freelancer, Guru, Project4Hire, Toptal, and Upwork
If you want to sell online courses and educational services, go to marketplaces like Codecademy, SkillShare, Teachable, Treehouse, Udacity, and Udemy.
If you want to write an e-book to sell, go to marketplaces like Amazon and Smashwords.
If you have digital products to sell (either your own or purchased from third parties), go to marketplaces like Affpaying, Amazon, ClickBank, CJ Affiliate, Gumroad, JV Zoo, Max Bounty, Offervault, PayLoadz, Peer Fly, Warrior Plus, and WeLoveAffiliates.
If you have physical products to sell, go to marketplaces like Amazon, eBay, Etsy, Fancy, Gumtree, Handmade, Newegg, ShareASale, Tophatter, and Wish. You may want to drop ship your products by heading to AliExpress.
If you have professional services to sell, go to marketplaces like Freelancer, Gigbucks, Guru, and Upwork.
If you are a handy person or like to run errands for people, go to your local digital marketplaces like Craigslist that advertises micro-jobs.
You will also learn how business and online transactions are conducted on these established marketplaces. You will learn about various management processes that will be invaluable to you when you do start your own business. You will learn about which website features that you would want to replicate on your own branded website if you do decide to have one later on.
Established marketplaces are just great online classrooms for you to build your knowledge, experience, and confidence.
What’s so great about this risk-free strategy is that there’s no shortage of how-to videos on YouTube to get you started immediately using one of these established marketplaces.
Until you give it a go, you don’t know many things about yourself.
You don’t know about your capabilities and interest in sustaining business and developing and launching products. You don’t know whether your products will be in demand so that you can make a sustainable and profitable living from it, perhaps even quitting your day job and going full-time in the future.
Once you’ve proven it in the market, you’ll develop your fully functional offering.
Start simple and get feedback early and often so you don’t waste time or money developing things that your customer doesn’t care about.
What can stop you?
Assess all possible sources of potential risks to your new business venture or initiative.
Gain an understanding of the need and process of constantly evaluating various sources of risk and opportunity.
Remind yourself that anything is possible.
Scale-up with your own website, find new ideas or ditch your idea altogether
After validating your minimum viable product using established marketplaces (rather than having your own branded website at the initial stages), you have a couple of choices.
(Option 1) Scale up on what you already have by developing and launching your own branded website to sell your winning product to your paying customers.
Launching your own website should be the last thing to do after focusing on your product creation, design, testing, validating, and launch. You have better control over the profitability of your product because you are not at the mercy of marketplace owners.
What’s more, you want to build up your own customer list because ‘money is in the list’. With control over your very own customer list, you can continuously nurture your leads and transform them into paying customers when it’s time for you to sell more of your products to them.
(Option 2) Continue using these established marketplaces and sell your products without having your own branded website.
You should plan to continuously improve your product offering as competitors will set in. Be a step or two ahead of your competitors.
(Option 3) Continuously refine and improve your product in collaboration with your customers using existing marketplaces until you are truly satisfied with the product’s quality, benefits, and features.
Roll out newer versions of your minimum viable product with improvements suggested by your customers.
(Option 4) Scrap your original product idea altogether if it’s a flop and go back to listening to your customers for new ideas.
Continuously refine your money-making idea for a specific target customer group. Use established marketplaces to continuously test and validate your idea, minimum viable product, and assumptions.
Abort your desire to start a side gig or business altogether without further loss of time, effort and money. You should not have any regrets whatsoever.
Some personality types are just natural at being business owners and entrepreneurs. Don’t be stressed over this option; it’s just who you are.
Don’t follow the advice of many gurus; that is to have a website first prior to vigorously validating your money-making idea and minimum viable product. Always get them validated first by your customers before spending any more time, effort, and money. This will guarantee your long-term financial success using this risk-free strategy.
Identify and sell the benefits of your solution
Once you have identified your potential solution, list the features of your product or service. These features will then be transformed into benefits statements.
Using a computer as an example, a feature of the computer is that it has “64 GB hard drive“. The benefit of the feature is that the customer can now “store a large number of files“.
A potential marketing message is this, “with a 64 GB hard drive, you can store all your important documents on one computer without having to worry about performance issues.“
Knowing your customers well will help you clarify the language that you can use for your benefit statements.
Rather than describing the product’s features and what it does, you need to brainstorm what the product will do for your consumers and what are the benefits of using the product.
Ask questions from the consumer’s perspective, “Why should I care about (blank) feature?” or “How does this product or service improve the quality of my life?“, will help you narrow down the language and perspective of the consumer group that you are targeting.
People do not care about the features. They only care about the benefits to them.
Compose your product or service’s benefit statement for each feature; “You (the customer) will get (benefit) from this feature or service,”
Do test your benefits statement on your customers.
The next thing you need to do is to quantify your benefits so that it becomes real to your customers.
Here are some examples:
- “Free training or a 24-hour customer service hotline.”
- “If you have a problem, just give me a call.”
- “Free shipping will save you $500 per month.”
- “This could save you up to $8,000 a month.”
- “Your efficiency will increase by up to 10 %.”
- “To save you start-up time, I’d like to offer you training and access to our high priority technical support. ”
What gets measured gets done through an implementation plan
Always set performance measures and goals for delivering on your final solution to your customers.
Some performance measures you could use include:
- Customer response time: “85% response rate within 24 hours”
- Overall customer experience rating: “80% or more high customer rating”
An implementation plan is a plan that you create to successfully move your business idea into action that makes money for you.
This document identifies your project tasks, timelines for completion, budget, necessary resources, and any assumptions made.
You may use any project management methodology to deliver the final solutions to your customers within agreed timeline, cost and requirements.