We’d like to start our blog series with some encouragement for all those who have been thinking about starting a business of their own yet keep putting it off.  Perhaps this is due to concerns about costs and risk, or maybe questions regarding where to start or how to build more than just the product.

Our book is meant to address this.  We strive to remove uncertainty and help turn paralysis into action by showing the different pieces that need to fall into place, and providing examples of specific tactics to get started for each of them. We think many readers will be surprised to see that, for many ideas, there exist fast and inexpensive ways to prototype a product or service, do some market tests and get real data to convince yourself of the revenue potential.  Armed with that experience it’ll then be a much easier decision to throw your full efforts behind building the business.

Tim Ferriss’ Four Hour Work Week opened many eyes to the world of online market testing. Before you even have a product ready to sell, advertise your envisioned offering to your target market, then measure how many people are willing to buy.  Your test subjects will see an “out of stock” message or an equivalent. Techniques like this can quickly give you hard data on the market potential for a new product or service, and creating the experiment can often be surprisingly quick and cheap.

For example, many such tests require only two primary components: a professionally designed website that pitches your offer, and an advertising campaign to drive a few hundred to a thousand pre-qualified visitors to the site. Each component can cost as little as $500, for a total of just $1000 over the course of 1-2 months to get real data and practical experience upon which to build your business.

Read our book to learn about how to setup such experiments and make sound decisions based on them. We cover many more techniques for getting started: Doing smart market research, testing sales potential, designing great products with the end-user in mind, working with outsourcing marketplaces to quickly get products developed, making data-based decisions with a financial model, etc.  We also include spreadsheets that illustrate the examples used in the book and can be adapted for your own business.

Give it a read – we think you’ll like it.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 14th, 2009 at 1:37 pm and is filed under Motivation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.