investment, idea, customer-development, strategy, testingI am validating my idea currently, and I just realised once I have validated the problem I will need to test it - However there is 1 big challenge, it is in a regulated industry like pharma, finance etc.
How can one test ideas in a regulated industry, without the need to attain expensive licenses? any suggestions?
Thanks, Stan
The same way you test most if not all markets. That is, by asking some variation of: “Would you buy this? If so how much would you pay for it?” And plenty of subtle follow-up questions to figure out what they’d actually buy if not or pay for more.
You won’t get firm pre-orders (since you’d need a license) but you can still do your market study.
If it is pharma, then, I assume, first on frogs, then on dogs, then on CEO. Jokes away, most of medicine we use have just pasted tests of this kind, since ancient times. Researchers infected themselves to test if they medical approaches work, they were taking obvious responsibility if the approaches did not. This is a well known history for any researcher.
If it is aviation, first aviators just tried they planes themselves. They were ready to accept consequences of they design being not yet perfect, and many did.
I do not know how it is in other industries, but most likely everywhere the same - after there is a reason to believe this may work and acceptably safe, the initiators test on themselves. Do not call for volunteers over the whole web to accept your risks.
It is always good to validate your idea before invest a lot of money or effort, but this job is not easy at all, you need to reach a lot of potential customers and check their reaction about your project.
there are other things you can do:
1- create landing page that implement your idea with the minimum features, or if the feature need too much develop, just talk about it as coming soon, then create feedback page and start to invite people to your site and ask them to write their feedback (you have to keep feedback form simple and useful) also do not forgot to promote your landing page in social community to crowd visitors.
2- you can do cold phone with your potential customers and ask them if they have that problem and looking for a solution that you will build.
3- try to find your competitors in the market and check if they got success, if they got success that mean your idea is valid.
4- finally you can post your idea in ideaCloudi.com, it is a new startup website to let people post their ideas and get feedback of vote for it.
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