QA 69 – Michael O'Neal answers "How do I validate my idea for an online business? "

In today's Q&A, we are helping Amanda figure out how to validate her idea before she spends a lot of time and money developing her digital product. Do you have a question you want answered on our podcast? We would love to help you! Click here to ask your question! [Tweet "Ideal customer =  least amount of work and most amount of money @solohour"] Resources Mentioned in this Episode Today's expert is Michael O'Neal from solopreneurhour.com Our episode with Michael O'Neal Evernote Michael's product called Sololab Tim Ferris Screw the Nine to Five Let's dive into this week's question! JOCELYN: Hey y'all! You're listening to an Expert Q&A with S&J. Today's expert is Michael O'Neal of The Solopreneur Hour podcast and solopreneurhour.com. Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast where life always comes before work. We're your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us, each week, as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside-down by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let's get started. SHANE: What's going on guys? Welcome back to another Q&A with S&J mini-podcast. Today we have an Expert Q&A and we are super-excited to welcome back Michael O'Neal of The Solopreneur Hour podcast and solohour.com. Michael, welcome back to the show, man! MICHAEL: Hey guys! So good to be back, I appreciate you having me on again. JOCELYN: Yeah, we are excited for you to answer another question – MICHAEL: Appreciate chya! Does that sound better? JOCELYN: Yeah, that's better. SHANE: I told somebody we were on your show and I said, I swear he had a drawl at the end of that; we sucked him into the south, man. MICHAEL: I'm ready, I'll do the whole show like this. I don't mind. JOCELYN: All right well, Amanda of teachsheetz.com says, "How do I validate my idea with my audience? I want to tell teachers about my Teach Sheetz website I'm currently working, on which can be used to create customized board sheets. Instead of sifting through the millions of options online, they can customize their own worksheet in under five minutes, using a site that has a functionality of Canva. I think this is a great idea but how can validate it with my target market? How do I know others can think it's a good idea before I spent all the time selling it? I don't have a huge audience, what do I do?" SHANE: This is a huge question we get Michael, and I'm really interested to see what you think about this because most of the time when I hear people get frustrated and quit online marketing, it's because they spend a month creating a product and nobody bought it. So Mike, how do you look at an idea and validate that in your business before you spend all that time, you know, creating something that nobody may even want? MICHAEL: I have an answer for both scenarios: One being that you have no list, no platform and one being that you have some list and some platform. So, the no-list and no-platform, here's one misnomer I think people have about online marketing in general is that everything has to be done online. And when you have more time than money, you can afford, time-wise, to actually go talk to people and if she is already immersed in the teaching community – I think a lot of times, when people come out with ideas for very, very niche businesses or products, it's because they are totally immersed in that – SHANE: They are the market basically. MICHAEL: They are the market. She's creating something for herself in this case. So, she has to go out and literally go find some of herself which is, don't do it super-casually, don't be like, 'Hey, you want to come to happy hour at six o'clock and we'll have a chat'. It's like no, find ten of your friends at least that are in the situation you are in and ask them, ask them what are your challenges here and how would you – I have this idea; however, before I tell you my idea, this is very important like what order you do this in.