Every world-changing innovation started with an idea. Unfortunately, there are no guarantees that your idea will attain much success. Even when you could feel 100 percent confident, it is essential to face the hard facts – only a small percentage of small businesses make it past three years.

Failing after you have invested your money and time can be a huge blow. So you want to ensure you are sure about the viability of your business idea before you can put your money into it.

This guide highlights several ways to test your business’s viability without spending a fortune.

Conduct Interviews

One of the greatest mistakes new entrepreneurs make is believing they have an excellent business idea and going full throttle without taking the time to know if their target audience feels the same. Such an approach only succeeds at causing a disconnect between the business idea and the consumer.

The best way to avoid such eventualities is to conduct interviews with your target market. If you have already built a social media following, you can use your followers as your interviewees. You can start by seeking to know their challenges and the solutions they need and build your business based on the feedback you gather from the interviews.

If your idea is based on the kind of solutions they hope to get, you could introduce your idea to them and see if it resonates with them. Besides helping you determine the viability of your idea, talking with your audience can help you develop a better-refined idea tailor-made for your target audience.

Build a Minimum Viable Product

If your business idea is based on creating products, following a lean startup model can be a great way of trying it out without spending a fortune. This approach is also called minimum viable option (MVP), which is the minimum form of your idea that you can sell as a product.

After introducing the low-cost product, you will begin receiving feedback from your consumers. You can then use this feedback to tweak your products to align as closely as possible to your audience’s expectations.

Run Your Idea through Critics

If you feel trying out your product by bringing it into the market is too much of a gamble, you could try passing it through some criticism from the potential target audience. To have your target audience critique your product, you have first to create a prototype of your product.

Once your prototype is ready, select a group of people from your target audience. For example, if you are creating a content generation tool, your group of critics should be content creators. After choosing your group, have them try using your product to identify its flaws.

Criticism is not always pleasant. However, it is critical as it can help you fine-tune your product for increased efficiency. If your group of critics points to a specific issue, it’s worth paying attention to.

Create a Landing Page and Direct Clients There

Once you have the word out about your product, it is vital to have a landing page where your audience can head for more information, even if they may not get the item at that moment. You can determine how much of an interest your idea is creating in your target market by looking at the number of people that make their way to your landing page.

Attracting traffic to your landing page if you are a new entrant into the market can be challenging. So you may want to increase traffic through paid Google or social media advertising.

Ensure that your landing page has a prominent call to action button that prompts them to take a step, such as subscribing to your list, answering some questions, etc. You can then use these interactions to determine the difference your business idea would make.