Proving your idea has legs

When I went into the ecentre in 2011, I was challenged to validate my business idea. This meant researching and testing the market to see if it had legs. Validating what I believed was a fantastic idea that would work and be very successful was a truly challenging experience.

‘Why,’ I asked myself (never out loud) ‘would I need to do that? I knew hundreds of disenchanted writers who, like me, were desperate to find answers to the question as to why some writing got published and other writing did not?’   The answer is not always a need to improve writing skills. The issue is much more complex than that. But that’s a topic for another blog.

When I was told I needed to ask my audience if they would be interested in a service like The Story Mint and would they be prepared to pay for it, the answer was a consistent ‘yes.’  I took that to mean that when I launched The Story Mint, customers would flock to my door. I had an impressive number of people using the ‘free’ version but when I then asked for the small sum $121 for a year’s membership my inbox went eerily quiet. That was a huge lesson for me.

Validation comes when someone is willing to pay for your offering. Being an online business adds a new dimension to the whole question of validation. We grew up with the Internet being a free service, and to change that ethos to asking for payment takes the transaction to a whole new level. Add to this, stories of on-line fraud and a need to build trust is magnified many times over.

So validation has to come in other (additional) forms . . . including building a loyal following, personal relationships and affiliations with like-minded people who are motivated by the same values. This last point is important.

Following my initial experience with the concept of validation, I became quite cynical and for a moment I was in a kind of bewildered wilderness. I had one saving grace. I knew I had developed a product that made The Story Mint unique – the Style Guide™.  Until someone came along with a ‘me too’ product I had something that answered my original question: why did some writers find publishers and others not? The Style Guide set the benchmark for what writing made it through the maze.

However, the advantage of being a first to market product meant the market also needed to be educated. People did not know what they did not know and validation took another form. I needed to determine which markets would find a non-fiction version of the Style Guide™ valuable. Thanks to some wonderful mentors and supporters from the ecentre I was able to explore this.

I became very focused and made it clear that The Story Mint was going to have to struggle on, on its own, as I concentrated on exploring the commercial applications for the Style Guide™. This was a commercial decision because The Story Mint, after almost three years was still not a viable business. We had passed the first validation test – that is, we had customers willing to pay for the service, but not enough to make it sustainable.

Luckily for me, other members of The Story Mint still believed in the concept and continued to keep it going by managing the serials, writers submitting starters and chapters, promoting it via social media and much more. The Style Guide™ also known as Earnest in The Story Mint world also gained committed supporters who kept telling me how it had changed their lives by challenging them to examine their writing. That support translated into validation and it meant the world to me.

So now we have come to another part of the validation journey – winning support from commercial and educational entities. The process has so far told us there is a market keen to use a tool like the Style Guide™ so long as it is configured for their specific needs, which is totally doable. Having achieved that validation we need to now gain further support in order to carry out the necessary work and once again validation for my idea is needed – this time in the form of funding.

This will come at a cost in terms of equity but an idea – good or bad is of no value if no-one knows about it or can use it.

Validation is an important concept, as is proof of concept.

Validation is an important concept as is proof of concept. However, the best validation is, without doubt, the moment when someone pays for what you offer or writes a supportive testimonial.