Unscripted: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Entrepreneurship pdfdrive com

3. Search Volume
The beauty of keyword, cost-per-click (CPC) advertising is that you can peek
into the marketmind and quantify the search volume for virtually anything.
While there are other keyword-driven search engines, Google is the best. Create
an AdWords account and log in to their Keyword Planner tool. Enter your
product, service, or solution, and find out how many people are searching for
your visionary offer. For example, if you are looking into creating a unique
wedding-planning tool, a quick review of the “wedding planning” keyword
reveals it has 30,000-plus searches per month. Moreover, your target
marketmind (couples getting married) is flush with searches, on average ten
million per month.
4. Ask/Interview The Market
Asking the market is as implied: Find a congregation of your target
marketmind and expose them to your idea. For instance, Reddit has an immense
variety of sub-forums, which cover virtually any topic or interest. Likewise,
Facebook has incredible targeting options where marketminds can be nailed
down into specific groups. Looking for females over thirty-five who have a
garden? Facebook can do it: Place an ad; send them to a page; see what happens.
If your idea pertains to a specific niche, say owners of exotic cars, find the related
forum(s) for it and ask.
Other possible asking venues are Craigslist, Instagram, and Twitter, although
these aren’t guaranteed to hit your desired market. The predictive power of
asking is directly related to how well you isolate your target customer in its
congregation. If you asked my forum about a potential idea serving small
business, you’d score great feedback because you hit the market exactly.
However, asking a group of entrepreneurs what they think about chiropractic
software would yield flawed data and not constitute soft proof. The ASK method
does NOT involve nagging your social circle, even if they represent your target
customer. These folks will not be honest or impartial. You want candid feedback
from strangers who, frankly, don’t give a shit about strangers.
The other alternative is solution-selling, discussed in Chapter 35. This
approach involves talking to various business owners and professionals and
specifically asking them about their problems, frustrations, and challenges.
When problems are identified, you try committing them to a solution. For

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example, if you interviewed ten home inspectors and they revealed frustrations
with contracts and paperwork, you confirmed a need. Probe further and you can
peg an ideal solution and an estimate of what they’d pay for it.
Another variation of interviewing the market is to compel your target
marketmind to complete a survey. Using one of the many survey tools,
SurveyMonkey, you could target and incentivize your target customer by using
any of the tools mentioned above. Of course, incentives and reaching your
market via CPC advertising (Facebook, Google, Reddit, Instagram) isn’t cheap,
but the data obtained are worth its price.

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