Trust your gut, then verify
When an idea grabs you, that’s your brain’s pattern recognition at work, fuelled by experience and subconscious musings. The ‘gut feeling’ is a nudge saying “there's something here worth exploring”. You’ll know an idea is worth paying attention to when it sticks to you like gum to a shoe. And the only way to deal with it is to act on it. But that can be hard. Where do you start?
You build a landing page. The holy grail of product and business development. Building one forces you to articulate the idea's value. Who is it for? What problem does it solve? Can you convince someone to believe in an idea that doesn't yet exist? (Though you need to present it as if it does!) A landing page is a litmus test for your idea's clarity and appeal.
Now, the real test: do people buy it? Nodding heads mean nothing. The strongest validation for any idea is people parting with their credit card details. If your landing page converts, your idea has legs. If it doesn’t, that’s feedback too. Maybe the value isn't as clear as you thought, or perhaps the idea needs reworking. A tough pill to swallow, but better to swallow it now than after you've built the thing.
OK, one last piece of the puzzle. How do you get traffic to your landing page? This is where you need to commit some skin to the game. This is where you need to pull out YOUR credit card and run some Facebook/Instagram ads. If you aren’t willing to spend a couple hundred bucks of your own money testing if your idea can sell, then you probably aren’t that serious.
This is what entrepreneurship takes: living 10ft outside your comfort zone, in a continuous loop of gut checks and reality checks. You start with a feeling, shape it into a clear, compelling proposition on a landing page, and then let the market decide.
If it fails, it's back to the drawing board. Refine, tweak, maybe start from scratch, guided by that mix of gut instinct and real-world feedback, until your vision lines up with something the world wants, or better yet needs.
Just don’t be another failed startup who spent millions building a team - to build an idea no one wanted in the first place. (Yes, you can raise millions on a completely un-market-tested idea.)
Maybe that was useful, maybe not.
Charles Burdett