Start a Business with an Ad

I wrote about dry testing a while back… but I’ve been thinking that even that method might take too long. At the foundation, all you really need to test the market viability of your new product/service is an ad itself. If you’ve created much more than that, you’ve probably wasted too much time.

I spent 4 hours last night testing out a new idea. 3.5 hours was spent getting the landing page just right. 30 minutes was spent setting up an AdWords account, choosing keywords, and writing a few ads.

The ads had dismal clicks based on the number of times the ads were shown. Of course, there’s always optimizations that can be made, but the ads contained the essence of my offer and I would have expected them to perform better if there was market interest.

I would have saved at least 3 hours if I would have just put up a butt ugly landing page. It didn’t need a great headline, fancy logo, call to action form, etc. If the ads performed well, I could then test the landing page offer.

By testing ads alone, you really can test a new idea every day. Sure, you might miss some potential winners that would have proven themselves with a little more TLC, but speed is your friend when looking to capture low-hanging-fruit.

All of this assumes you are trying to bring something totally new to the market, which isn’t actually the best idea. There’s probably a reason there’s no competitors. You don’t really need to test if there’s market interest if you are creating a “me-too” business. The fact that competitors exist means there’s a market for what you want to offer. But can you do it better? If not, move on. Find something you can do better than anyone else.

But first things first, don’t build anything until you know people want what you have to offer.

Click the “Contact Me” link above if you need some quick advice.