A Startup Guy

Image by danielbroche via Flickr

It’s not uncommon for entrepreneurs to dream up a product, produce it, unleash it on an unsuspecting public and then pray like crazy that someone buys. Here are a couple of alternatives where you can test public interest in your product before you go to great expense of mass producing it.

Timothy Ferris, in his book 4 Hour Work Week, suggests listing your product on an auction on eBay. See if you can generate some interest in buying your product. Then cancel the auction just before it ends. The benefit of this method is people are actually laying their money on the table for your product. They vote for it with their wallet. Personally, I have a moral problem with this method. Offering something for sale when you don’t intend on completing the sale just seems wrong to me. It’s too reminiscent of Lucy pulling the football when Charlie Brown tries to kick it. I do admit that I tried this method once, just as an experiment. However, I actually had a product in hand that I could send people if they were truly interested in it. It was an e-book, so the cost to produce was minimal.

Another option is to use ad systems like Google AdWords to advertise your product and see if anyone shows an interest in buying by following the link. Once you’ve directed them to your site, you can take them to a page that notes that your product is not yet ready to ship and you’ll be happy to notify them once it is. The benefit to this method is that people who go to the trouble of following the link to your site are more likely genuinely interested in buying than your college room mate or your mom, which is many entrepreneurs’ focus group.

That brings us to the most common form of product testing, asking family and friends. “Hey, I’ve got this idea for a….” “Oh, yeah. I’d buy that.” “Thanks, mom.” This method is easy and cheap, therefore its the default for many startup. It’s also the least effective.

Basically, the effectiveness of judging if someone will be willing to shell out their hard earned money for your new product is inverse to the time, money and effort you have to put into testing your product’s desirability.

Do you have any other good ways to test product ideas? Add a comment below and share.