How to validate your business idea for less than 100$ - Part 1.

Last year I had an idea about an online portal for collecting bars and restaurants menu in one place and compare their foods and drinks, so I wanted to create a prototype and send it to a startup incubator. I spent months learning and developing a Ruby on Rails webapp with tons of code and headaches, but the point was that nobody wants it. I litterally wasted my time, but what if you could validate the potential market for you startup BEFORE creating the prototype?


This is not a magic formula , but simply some notes and procedures that I found on the net or I have personally tried. In a nutshell you have to create a landing page that describes your product or business idea, promote your page using ads and finally watch at conversion rates.

STEP 1 - Create a landing page.

www.launchrock.com is probably the most famous and is my first choice in this type of test thanks to his simplicity. You only have to choose a template and complete some important forms about project info.

 The main problem might be that you don't have a logo and you don't want to spend so much time or money to do that so, initially, I prefer to keep it as simple as possible: just pick up a free font that you like from web (e.g from www.google.com/webfonts) , install it on your computer,  type the name of the project into a text editor with new font and finally remove the white backgroud with Gimp, as explained in this video

That's it! In less than an hour you can have your page online ready to collect customers email.
Launchrock offers a lot of possibilities also for developers, in fact you can manage html, css and javascript directly on the site and customize pretty much everything without worring about backend problems. If you want to go deeper in testing your idea and appear more professional to your potential customers, I suggest you to buy a domain name and link it to your project in Launchrock following their tutorial.

In the following post I will talk about how to start an AdWords campaign with Google and start see if your idea has an active audience.

WB