Test marketing – is your idea sound?

Is your small business idea sound?

Before you kick off your project it is probably worth checking whether your small business idea is sound.

Why?

Just as people will never tell you that your baby is ugly, you will seldom get an honest opinion on whether your business idea is sound.

There is only one thing that you need to do

TEST MARKETING

Put simply, all you have to do is ask a representative sample of your prospective customers

• Is there a market for this type of product or service?
• Would they be likely to buy it?
• How much would it be worth or how much would they be prepared to pay?

If you are thinking of opening a shop, you could ask a number of people on the pavement. If you are looking at business to business it could be by phone.

Try it out – you might be surprised by the results.

This approach could save you a lot of money. A number of years ago after a conversation with a mobile telephone company I saw a gap in the market for a system to test the quality of mobile networks. One of my first actions was to spend a day test marketing. I put telephone calls in to all the mobile phone companies and by the end of the day I had found out that there was a company already producing this exact type of system. That day I saved myself several thousand pounds – I might just as easily have been in contract negotiations with a mobile phone company to develop the idea.

A word of caution – don’t share your idea on an internet bulletin board. You may find that someone steals it! It is a more common problem than you may think.

So before you rush out to try your small business idea – it may just be worth test marketing it.

To see an example of how another company have test marketed their idea – read this example.