How to Discover and Validate Your Business Idea

I've networked with quite a few Product Managers recently as I'm trying to transition from marketing to a Product Management role and there was one statement that one of the Product Managers I spoke with said that resonated with me.

"It's very easy to gather knowledge but it's very hard to get experience."

There's a wealth of resources to get knowledge on Product Management. I bought a couple books, took a Product Management certification program from Product School and although the program mimic what a Product Manager would go through from ideation to execution, it isn't the real thing.

As the pandemic hit and everything shut down in mid March, at that point I thought to myself that this would be a good opportunity to build something and apply the knowledge I have gathered from all those resources to prove that I had the tangibles to be successful in Product Management.

The question then became, what skill is in demand that I'm good at and I could utilize to launch an online business to make money?

In this article, I'm going to highlight the steps I took to discover my idea and how I was able to validate and pivot it.

By telling my story, I hope it helps you generate and validate ideas that you want to launch to have an additional source of income or have more control in your life.

Get involved in the industry you want to solve a problem for.

When the pandemic hit, there were a lot of layoffs (both temporary and permanent) in my area in a wide array of industries. Thankfully my industry wasn't hit that hard and I wasn't one of the casualties.

I wanted to try to give back in some way to professionals that were less fortunate and had been impacted due to the pandemic. I saw a post from a 2nd degree LinkedIn connection of how he wanted to start a group where professionals volunteer their time to help other professionals that were impacted due to the pandemic through the following:

• Resume Review
• Networking Advice
• General Career Advice

I reached out to him right away to sign up and the site was launched a few days later. We got a lot of traction the first couple weeks with a good volume of leads per day. I ended up connecting with about 2-3 a week, mainly in the marketing and sales sector as that's where my expertise is from.

From interacting with these professionals, I noticed some common problems:

• From layout to content, a lot of these resumes could be improved in various ways
• Most didn't have their LinkedIn profiles optimized
• All of them have done little to zero networking on LinkedIn to help improve their careers

I've used effective resume writing to get my first job out of University, I optimized my profile properly to get messages from recruiters and finally I used LinkedIn to network to help me transition from agency to a large telecom company in Canada.

With all that being said, I have a wealth of knowledge that I have applied in my career to get to where I need to go throughout my career.

There's two things that I discovered from volunteering in this group during the pandemic.

Problem: Many professionals do not know how to write an effective resume or know how to utilize LinkedIn properly to improve their opportunities.

Solution: I have the necessary skills and experience to help accelerate their personal branding efforts to get them to where they need to go.

I have identified the problem, and I have a solution to help my target market. The next step is to get my positioning down in order to speak to my target market on how I can help them.

The Positioning

I didn't want to be another resume writer that offered LinkedIn optimization as part of the package. I wanted to focus on helping people build a personal brand on LinkedIn but I needed to figure out an angle that would make me stand out.

From speaking to a career coach that I've been working with, she told me about two features that professionals should take advantage of on LinkedIn:

• The new Featured section on LinkedIn where you can attach key files to show off some of your accomplishments or articles
• Custom LinkedIn cover photos to stand out from other professionals that still use the default LinkedIn blue header

That would be my positioning, I wouldn't do just rewriting someone's LinkedIn profile, I would also brand their profiles with design to help their profile pop. That's where I decided to buy Canva pro. There is a free version but it has limited capabilities, but by having the pro version I would be able to deliver designs that people wouldn't normally be able to do bringing more value to the table and a differentiation point.

I would not offer resume writing services for now as it's not what I really want to focus on at that current moment, but will add it if LinkedIn personal branding isn't a strong enough offering by itself.

With my preliminary positioning nailed down, it's time to validate the idea.

Validating The Idea

As the professional volunteer group was winding down in early May, I decided I was going to pursue this more heavily on my own.

When it comes to validating your idea, there are two phases. The first is validating your idea in the planning phase and the second is validating your idea post launch through some small investments in marketing to find the level of demand.

Validation During The Planning Phase

In the planning phase you're validating whether there is already a demand and market for your type of offering while the post launch phase is whether there is a demand and market for YOUR SPECIFIC offering.

The planning phase validation should only take you a few hours and there's a couple ways to do this.

Online research - Type in your offering on Google and try to be as specific as possible. Look at the volume of results and the first page of searches. If there's a lot of content as it pertains to your service, there is a market out there.

In addition, also see if companies are bidding on your specific keywords on Google. If there are multiple companies bidding on ad placement for your keywords, that's another indicator that there is demand there.

Try to look at a few of the sites that show up on the first page to see if you can gauge what their pricing structure is, this will help you price your own product as well as include necessary features to compete.

Ask your target market or professionals involved in your industry - There are tons of content about how to optimize your LinkedIn profile so now the question is, with all this free content would people still pay someone to do it for them, based on the feedback I got, the answer is yes.

I spoke to a career coach that I have worked with and she said that there is definitely a segment of professionals that want you to do it for them. She actually had a client where she experienced this, she told him everything he needed to do and he still didn't want to do it, he would rather give his LinkedIn login to her and get her to update the profile for him, herself.

After speaking to professionals involved in the career help industry, I then asked a few professionals that I helped in the group about the service I wanted to launch and asked them would they pay someone to help them.

They explained that when I first helped them they told me that they were mainly focused on their resume and cover letter; however based on our work together they understood the value of LinkedIn and that it's more than just a professional profile you update once in awhile. If used properly it could generate countless opportunities for them.

With validation from professionals in the career help industry and from my target market, I had enough evidence to launch a test offering to see how the market would respond. I highly recommend to people that want to launch a test online to keep your overhead extremely low, and use some of your leftover funds to run some advertising so you can measure the exact demand of your offering and can pivot as necessary.

With that mindset, I didn't hire any web designer and used the easy web builder Squarespace. It provides easy editable templates as well as simple eCommerce so I can take online payments, the essentials I need to launch this business idea.

Once I launched my online business, I set up a Google Ads campaign and set the budget to $20/day only bidding on LinkedIn related keywords such as:

• LinkedIn Profile Optimization
• LinkedIn Writing Service
• LinkedIn Coach

My ad also highlighted the price to weed out people who can't afford my offering and prevent unnecessary clicks.

I ran the Google Ads campaign for a couple weeks and got a total of 7 clicks, which proves during the post launch validation that I cannot offer LinkedIn personal branding on its own. I would have to incorporate it into a package with resume writing services in order to generate more interest, something I didn't want to initially do but had to now to increase demand for my offering.

Once I added resume keywords to my Google Ads campaign I was spending my budget daily. Although I haven't gotten any sales yet, I have got a couple leads which shows that I pivoted in the right direction, a personal branding package that includes resume writing and LinkedIn branding.

To summarize, here are my 3 steps on how you can find your next business idea and test it quickly with a small budget:

1. Get involved in the industry you want to pursue and focus on solving a problem. - Remember, starting a business for the sake of making an income, will not work. You need to find a problem that people are willing to pay you for to help solve. The bigger the problem, the more people are willing to pay for your solution.
2. Validate your idea during the planning stage via online research and talking to people in your target market. - It will give a general idea whether there is a demand for your type of offering.
3. Spend a small investment on online advertising to test your specific offering. - If there's only a small volume of clicks and you aren't fully utilizing your daily ad budget, that means the demand of your product isn't high and you'll have to pivot the offering to increase demand, which I had to do. If there are clicks but no conversions on your website, that means you have an in-demand offering but they aren't choosing your offering for some reason. This is where good sales copy comes in.

It's been about a month since I launched this business and although I haven't generated regular recurring revenue yet, I have learned a lot of online skills that I otherwise wouldn't have gathered by only working my job. I'm excited to see how the next few months play out.

If you know of other ways to generate business ideas or validate your offering, share your story by leaving a comment below!