We’ve all had those lightbulb moments, haven’t we? Maybe we’ve been in the shower, working out at the gym or sat stuck in traffic. A solution to a problem you’ve faced has come to mind, or a new and improved way of handling a process has just popped into your head. We often get wrapped up in these ideas and can’t help but fantasize about the business opportunities that they could present. But before we run off and start devoting major time and resources to these ideas, we need to make sure that there is a demand for them in the marketplace or else we could be wasting our time.

Spending time and energy on a business idea without validating it first can be easily done as people often get caught up in an idea that they’re convinced the public will respond too. Even the big boys of the business world have experienced spectacular product launch failures. However, whereas those companies have the resources to take the hit for something that nobody wants, us small business owners don’t usually have that luxury. Our investment of time, energy and money needs to be going towards something that has a chance of being successful and taking the time to validate your idea is going to help you have a much higher chance of success in the marketplace.

What’s the best way to go about validating your idea? Well, there a number of different ways you can do this depending on the size of your company and the amount you want to invest in terms of time and money. We may not be able to get a focus group or consumer research project started but with the technology at our fingertips today, there’s never been an easier, or cheaper, time to validate an idea. We can research competing products, check out how much online activity there is for certain keywords or even build a simple landing page and monitor the response it gets with some basic advertising through AdWords. Social media is also a fantastic, low-cost way of measuring how responsive people are to your idea, product or service. You can get real-time feedback from people all over the world. Information is key and we have access to a staggering amount of it!

Our guest on this episode of your favourite small business podcast, Ajay Prasad, is going to take us through his experiences of validating a business idea and share some actionable tips that will help you validate your idea with minimal costs.

Issue Challenged in this Small Business Podcast:

How can I know if there’s a demand for my product in the marketplace?

About Ajay:

Ajay Prasad is the founder and president of Global Marketing Resources, a web design and marketing agency based in California. He’s also the founder of GMR Transcription, a hugely successful web based transcription and translation service that he built from scratch after recognizing a problem and being unable to find a satisfactory solution.

Prior to becoming an entrepreneur, Ajay built up a wealth of marketing, consumer research and strategic planning experience in both the corporate and the startup fields. He’s with us on your favourite small business podcast to share his thoughts on how to find out if there is demand out there for your product or service.

Actionable Tips:

* Test the response to your idea through digital marketing. It can be as simple as putting up a landing page, using Google AdWords and monitoring the response. You can even ask for feedback from your friends and family through social media. It’s inexpensive and won’t demand too much of your time.

* Start to research competitors. Find out as much as possible about other companies who are providing similar products and services. Analyse how successful they are, who their customers are and what their unique value proposition is. If your search doesn’t turn up any similar companies, then it could be a sign that there is not a market out there.