Got a great Business idea - Is it Viable?

With an early stage business, if you are not meeting a customer need, you don’t have a business. Access to customers and their feedback is vital for a new venture or start-up business. If research (however preliminary) shows customers are willing to buy what you’re selling, all other parts of the business can grow from this starting point.

Nothing beats hearing this feedback first hand. This means the people doing the work and making the decisions understand the customer intent as well as what they said, and can readily apply this to everything they do. There is an art to how you have customer testing conversations, which is very different from selling or advising.

For early stage businesses, customer testing should be done regularly and will be used to help answer all sorts of questions – the problem, solution, value proposition / messaging, pricing model, product development, sales channels & marketing tactics – and therefore needs to be a core capability within your team.