Don’t Hide Your Ideas. Test Them with Accessible Customers whom Will Listen

Colleges/Universities “welcoming back” students

Reasons to Start a Business While in College: Accessible Customers

How to Test It Before Launching?

If you study in a college and you decide you want to move forward with your idea, you’ll want to start market testing on a small scale.

Students are a valuable resource for initially testing out your ideas. They tell it like it is if they don’t like what you have to offer. If you can get students to pay for something it’s a good sign your product or service is viable. Students are also connectors. They have the power to manufacture virality.

If you’re creating a physical product, have prototypes made so that students can test it out and give you feedback on its design and functionality. Alternatively, if you’re creating a service, online business, or mobile app, make a simple, streamlined version and have them start doing beta testing, providing thoughts on the interface, ease of use, and overall satisfaction.

Use all of this feedback to your advantage. Don’t outright dismiss criticism without considering it, and remember that if multiple testers have the same complaint, it’s probably a problem worth solving.

“You should talk [to] and/or survey at least 50 potential customers, to see if they identify with the problem the same way you do,” said Wayde Gilchrist, a startup consultant and host at TechStartRadio.com.

At this stage, you’ll want to move outside the sphere of your student friends. You want to start getting the opinions of people with whom you don’t have a personal relationship.

For this stage, you can have the people in your life enlist potential customers to provide feedback, or you can use social media to recruit a list of volunteers.

Hopefully, by getting these unvarnished opinions, you can start to refine your creation so that it’s suitable to be unveiled to the public at large.

Frederic Kerrest is the co-founder, executive vice-chairman, and COO of identity management company Okta. Frederic built a billion-dollar company around the concept of identity protection, but when it comes to ideas, he’s all about transparency.

He tests ideas by bouncing them off of people, including partners, prospects, colleagues, customers, investors — pretty much anyone who will listen. Talking through ideas helps him look at the problem he is trying to solve through different lenses, and getting feedback early on saves him valuable time in the long run.

He shares new ideas with as many people as he can, as often as he can. He has the strong opinion that keeping their ideas to themselves is a big mistake. Some people don’t want to share their ideas because they are worried someone is going to steal them. This kind of fear usually means they don’t have the experience and expertise needed to be thinking 30 years ahead of everyone else.

But even more importantly, this fear indicates to them that the idea can be easily implemented without barriers, signaling it’s really about who can run faster. This does not create sustainable competitive differentiation and innovation in the long term.

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