Is your business idea ready to be launched?

This post was originally published in the Lakewood Observer.

Often times, it is easy to come up with a great business idea. The hard part is actually coming up with a plan to turn the idea into a viable business and executing the plan strategically.

But how do you know when it is the right time to take your idea to the next level? After all, creating a viable business is no quick and easy task. It makes sense to ensure that your idea is indeed viable before making the leap to starting a business.

Validating a business idea is an essential, and yet overlooked, component to the entrepreneurial process. While many established companies spend millions of dollars and countless months validating concepts, the following suggestions are simple and inexpensive, yet effective, ways that you can validate your business idea:

Talk to your future customers: Understanding the real pain point of the customers you wish to serve is critical. Even more importantly, find out how real this pain is and how badly your future customers wish to solve this pain. Ask yourself if you can develop a solution that is better than how they currently solve this problem.

Get Data: Become an expert in as many facets as you can in the subject matter your potential business relates to. Read trade journals. Find research reports. If this sounds expensive, remember that many of these materials can be found online or through your local public library for free.

Use Tools: There are a myriad of cheap, and even free, tools available to help entrepreneurs validate business ideas:

• SurveyMonkey.com allows you to quickly create professional online surveys.
• AYTM.com allows you to specify demographics and survey questions and will quickly find respondents.
• Unbounce.com allows you create a custom-branded splash page so you can collect data on whether consumers are interested in your idea.
• ReferenceUSA allows you to learn more about the industry you are targeting. You can access certain data sets for free by using your library card at most public libraries.
  
  

Learn more about validating your business at the next Startup U event, presented by Startup Lakewood. Joe Haddad and Nick Dadas, Co-Founders of University Tee’s, will be on hand to discuss other strategies that entrepreneurs can use to validate business ideas. This event will take place on Tuesday, July 26 at 6:30 pm at the Lakewood Public Library Main Auditorium and is free and open to the public.

More information on this event and Startup Lakewood can be found at www.startuplakewood.com.

Prototype Day

Earlier today, my partner, Bryan, and I had the opportunity to present a prototype of the product we've begun developing to a crowd of about 45 10x Xelerator mentors, entrepreneurs, investors, and the like.  The feedback was great.  While everybody was certainly positive about the business we're building, one thing was apparent.

We have a lot of work to do.

I don't mean that as a dig on us.  I actually think we positioned ourselves quite well.  Even still, it was apparent that all of the 10x teams have a lot of work to do if we all plan on building and growing sustainable businesses.  It's just the reality of a startup.  It's not about writing 10,000 lines of code.  It's not just about finding a couple of bizdev deals to close.  It's not about choosing a couple of buzzwordy marketing methods to toy with.

It's about the whole package.  Putting it all together.  Taking a great idea that solves a real problem, wrapping a sound business model around it, getting feedback from customers, and just flipping doing it.  Good ol' fashioned execution.

Time to roll the sleeves up...

A Web 2.0 Entrepreneurs Toolbox

As a new tech entrepreneur in the year 2011, I feel lucky to have so many tools at my disposal in building/launching my business that it almost feels unfair compared to those trying to do the same 10 years ago.  Back then, it likely cost at least 10x more to launch the same type of business than it does today.  Here are a few tools that I've found myself using over the past two weeks.  Some of these are free, some of these are paid-for.  Regardless, I can say with certainty that each of these tools has allowed me to accelerate on the cheap:

• Survey Monkey:  Simple to-use, widely recognized survey tool, with a free version available, to-boot.
  
  
• SurveyGizmo:  Not as widely recognized as Survey Monkey, but it works just as well as a survey tool (if not more user-friendly).
  
  
• Ask Your Target Market:  You have to pay for this, but it's so worth it.  You can specify your exact target market, survey that group, and get responses in a matter of hours.  You pay-per-response, and certain features (i.e. open ended answers, qualifying questions) are extra.  After you add it up, it's not difficult for the per-response rate to be $3 or $4 (or more), but time is money and AYTM is a time-saver.  Plus, the site itself is dripping with ease-of-use.  Their chat-enabled customer support people rock, too.  They even gave me copy suggestions for the questions I was asking.
  
  
• Insight.ly:  Very simple CRM.  When I used to work for a bigger organization, we used NetSuite -- which was expensive and mostly difficult to use.  Insightly has a lot of features that not only work well, but are pretty nifty (such as a dedicated email address that, when copied, automatically files the email you're sending into the appropriate folder.  Oh yeah...it's free.
  
  
• Google Apps:  This is how we got turned onto Insight.ly.  It's a monthly subscription per-user, but it's what gave us access to Insight.ly and other tools
  

I'll post another installment of awesome web 2.0 tools that I use, but these all rock and are worth looking into ASAP.

Is being a perfectionist a bad thing?

I often hear people tell me that they're perfectionists.  They say it in a sort-of self-deprecating kind of way, but most people on the other end always find it a bit endearing.  After all, what's not to like about somebody that loves to give it their all and create something that's perfect?  But yesterday, I heard a quote from Jeff Lamb, CTO and self-proclaimed nerd from Q-Start Labs, that challenges this notion.

"Good is the enemy of perfect."

Actually, it was Voltaire that originated this quote, but it's definitely one that made me think.  After all, shouldn't we execute everything we set out to do perfectly?

Nope.  Not as a startup.

The notion isn't that we should settle for something that's sub-par.  Instead, at this critical stage of building a company, we should be putting a very basic product in front of customers, iterating, pivoting (if necessary), and repeating steps 1 - 3.  You can't do this if you spend months behind closed doors creating a perfect product.  The reality is, you have no idea if what you're creating is "perfect" until you put it in front of the very people that can actually tell you:  your customers.

From here on out, I'll think twice before proclaiming myself to be a perfectionist.

Meeting your Customers

It's week two of eleven for all of the teams participating in the 10x Xelerator program in Columbus, Ohio.  There's a very common question / piece of advice I've been getting from some of the amazing mentors participating in the program.  Each asks the question in a different way, but essentially they want to know...

"How many customers are you meeting with?"

It's such a simple question, yet so, so critical to businesses like ours at this stage in the startup process.  It doesn't matter at all how great of an idea Bryan and I have.  I know that.  Our success is dependent on our ability to say "Yes!" to the following three questions:

1. Does our product/service actually solve a real problem for our customers?
2. Is the problem that we solve significant enough where customers are willing to pay for it?
3. Can we execute and see our solution through?

So in week #2, it's absolutely critical we talk to customers and answer those first two questions.  I better stop blogging and get to work.

Creating an Inferno

During our first day of the 10x program, Mark Kvamme -- a partner at Sequoia Capital -- made a point to all of us that we should be attempting to "create an inferno."  He went on to describe how Funny or Die did this initially with their Landlord video.  If you haven't seen that video, it's definitely worth watching (especially if you're a Will Ferrell fan).  But it's the Sasquatch Dancing Man video that really illustrates this fact.  This video is a real-life example of the life of an internet meme.

Take a look:



There's irony there, because the video itself ended up becoming an internet meme.  One odd, gyrating dancing man at a music festival goes on to create an inferno-like dance party.  What I would give to be that dancing man this summer and beyond...

Day One

Well, it's officially real.  Bryan and I arrived to our office space at One Marconi Place a hair before 8:30am and were surprised to find ourselves as the first team in the office.  The space is pretty small for 10 teams with 2-3 people on each team -- but it's very nice.  Think light hardwood and exposed brick walls.

Honestly, they could put us in a supply closet and we'd still be pumped at the opportunity to build a successful business this summer with assistance from the program.

• The actual programming is fairly light, which allows us to do the work we need to do to build our business. 
• The mentors are amazing.  Our direct mentors, Christopher Celeste and Blake Squires, were already our close friends and advisors.  But we met others last night from Central Ohio's (and beyond) entrepreneurial and investment communities that I'm hopeful we can build a real relationship with.
• The teams seem to be pretty solid.

We know exactly what we need to do -- and now it's time to roll up our sleeves and, as Mark Suster says, JFDI.