Before You Do Anything: Try It Out

So you know, roughly, what you want your business to be. Before you go any further and start investing, though, you need to try it out. Here’s how.

Build a Prototype.

If you plan to sell physical things, or you’re going to do something like starting a website or making software, then you should build a prototype to see how your idea will work out. A prototype is a version of your product that serves to show that your idea is feasible in the real world. If it would be too expensive to build the whole thing, then just building the new part that differentiates you from your competitors is good enough.

Show your prototype to a few people, to see what they think. Are they excited? Would they use it?

Get a Few Customers.

If your product is relatively low-value, or you’re providing a service, then it shouldn’t be too much trouble to get a few customers and do a few dry runs. Do them a generous discount (you could even do it for free), to make sure that everything runs smoothly and the customers are satisfied at the end of it.

For example, let’s say you plan to be a landscape gardener from home. You could borrow the tools, and volunteer to do a garden for some kind of charity project – this is good, since it means that you’re doing something nice for charity, but they’re not paying for perfection, so it’s not that bad if small things go wrong. You should then go through all the motions as you would once your business is established, and see what comes out at the other end.

Here’s another one. Let’s say you’re a chef living outside Italy, and you plan to start a home business cooking pasta in your kitchen and delivering it to customers (you’d be surprised how many home businesses there are in the catering industry). You could make a rough draft of a brochure (with discounted prices) and deliver it to a small number of homes in the area, until you get a response. You could then see if it really is feasible to make and deliver these things, and whether there would be any profit in it.

Also, split-test marketing is really big. You basically create 2 versions of what it is you're testing. They need to make the same presentation with differing offers or calls to action. You are generally testing to see which one is the most attractive or magnetic - which is the most effective or produces the best results.


I test for months sometimes before determining the best course of action. If you want to save yourself from making mistakes without understanding or merely guessing at how the mistake was made, test - try it out before you go live!