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How do you enter into the pool, the sea or the ocean?

You probably dip your toes, splash your body with just a little bit of water and then go in slowly.

You aren't crazy enough to jump in head-first before getting a feel of the water first, right? If you are, you're INSANE!

But in which of the two ways do you start off business ideas? Probably the latter, the crazy-insane way.

You get an idea, put weeks or months into it and then wonder why nobody is buying. That's because you haven't dipped your toes. Instead you dove in head-first.

Last week, we talked about the 3 possible problems for not getting a sale. Today we'll talk about how to ensure product-market fit before you go all-in on a business idea.

You can do this by... *drumroll*... validating your idea.

This simply means checking to see if anybody will buy what you want to sell.

There are 2 ways to go about this:

• build a simple version first and try to sell it
• or try to sell something before you even create it

You may remember that I built a dropshipping store for watches back in 2017. Instead of creating a massive store with 30+ watches, I should've simply created a store with 2 or 3 watches.

This would take me maybe a week, including the entire Shopify setup and everything. Or even better, I could've offered watches (or other cool products) to my friends and family without even building a store.

And the other way, as I mentioned above, is to sell stuff before you even create it.

A great example for this is a $600 course Sam Parr (founder of The Hustle) sold together with Gagan Biyani (founder of Udemy). They simply built a sales page and promoted it... without creating a course at all!

And because they were satisfied with the amount of money they made, Sam & Gagan went ahead and created the course within a week. In case the course didn't make enough money, they'd simply refund the buyers. How simple and cool is that?!

AppSumo is an 8-figure business now. But back in its early days, Noah Kagan negotiated software deals and did the promotions manually. Only after he started making a lot of sales with different software deals did he hire other people and created a website to make the entire process easier.

So before you go all-in on any business idea, always validate it first.

Noah suggests to try and make $100 within 48 hours. I'd say both the amount and the time depend on what you're selling. But to make it simple, $100 in 48 hours is a good start.

You can simply ask your friends, family, colleagues, acquaintances or whoever you think will be interested in buying what you're offering.

It shouldn't be that hard, really. If it is too hard, then probably the product isn't that good and your validation failed. Which is great -- you can move on to a different product and not spend too much time on a bad idea.

Next week we'll go into how you can create your first info product, validate it and make your first $$$ online -- everything in less than a week.

If you already made money online, you'll still want to learn the easiest way to do it. So make sure you read the next week's email...

See you around,

Filip