Unfortunately, not every new idea, irrespectively of how good it may seem, can grow into a successful project. Many startup ideas remain unrealized or fade even before the first results are seen. Thus, before bringing your idea to life, it is recommended to test your hypothesis and therefore get a few proofs that your endeavour will be crowned with success.
Here are 10 practical experiments that will help test your startup idea.
1) Investigate the Market and the Problem
1. Tell publicity about what you are doing. This is where blogging will come in handy. In doing this, you will get a number of personal feedbacks that you can use to assess the results you have already achieved.
2. Use online discussion tools like Quora to ask open questions. There are lots of customers ready to give feedbacks and express their point of view. So, the task is to find these people and give them an opportunity to speak out. Go to the most popular forums like Reddit or Q&A sites and open a discussion.
3. Hold and opinion poll and experiment with different types of incentives (monetary and nonmonetary). Perhaps the easiest way to learn more about your customers needs, as well as elicit their feedback is to send questionnaires to them. To fuel hype to the new product, you can offer customers some monetary reward off your product once it hits the market.
4. Experiment with test advertisements. Use platforms like Bing, Google AdWords and Yahoo! to create advertisements that direct users to a pre-order page of your product or to the page entreating email signup. Decide which advertisements are the most efficient.
5. Gather pre-orders. Measuring market demand for a particular service or product has become a lot easier with the invention of crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo. Just offer your product to the masses, describe its features and you will see whether or not people are interested in your product.
2) Investigate the Solution
6. Create several test pages of your website/product. This is a great way to analyze how customers view your startup. To build launch pages and analyse user data, you can use sites like Launchrock.
7. Discuss your beta product with real users. When launching a new product it is crucial to know what users think about it. Websites like StartupLi.st, Erli Bird and Betali.st will help find people eager to test your startup out.
3) Market
8. Experiment with marketing campaigns and analyze which one is the most efficient. This is where social-media analysis tools, like Bottlenose and Copromote will come in handy.
9. Analyse information about site usage. To get an insight into your targeted market, it is necessary to find out what words give the greatest number of hits. Take time to investigate Google Analytics that allows tracking users cohort, interest segmentation and demographic information.
10. Experiment with nonmonetary and monetary referral programs. Perhaps the easiest way to attract new customers is to use various referral programs. Do not forget about your current customers and encourage them to take part in your referral programs by offering monetary incentives.