One Question Friday: What Does It Mean To "Test Your Business Ideas"?

**Sam Parr** (0:00)
All right, there's this amazing book called Getting Everything You Can Out Of All You've Got. I read it a few years ago and it changed my life.
And the reason I loved it was because it basically talks about how to get and make more money using things that you already have.
Coincidentally, today's podcast is brought to you by Business Made Simple. It's a podcast by Donald Miller, who I'm gonna tell you about in a second, but he has this amazing episode that's all related to this book and the things that I learned in this book. It's called How To Make Money With What You Already Have. It's an incredible episode. It talks about all the stuff that I learned in this book. The host is Donald Miller. I didn't know who Donald Miller was up until recently, but over the last 12 months, this is totally by coincidence. It was all separate people. They said, you have to check out Donald Miller. He's amazing. So I'm happy that he's part of HubSpot's podcast network. You can check it out, Business Made Simple Podcast. It's where he coaches you on how to build your business like an airplane, where the cockpit is your leadership, the body is your overhead, the right engine is your marketing, the left engine is your sales.
You have to check it out. This guy's amazing. It's called Business Made Simple with Donald Miller.

**Bernard** (1:10)
Hey, MFM, this is Bernard from Berlin, Germany.
My question is about testing your business ideas. So I've heard a bunch of people on your podcast talk about this already and how it's part of what made them successful.
Now, I don't really understand what this means, testing your business ideas. The only thing I can think of is maybe running multiple ads and comparing the performance. But beyond that, I really don't know what to do. So could you, first of all, tell me how you have seen this done successfully in the past? And second of all, how I can become better at it? Thank you.

**Sam Parr** (1:48)
All right, the guy asked, Shaan, he said, I hear you talk about testing ideas. What does that mean? Does that mean just like running ads to like a page and getting sales? And the answer is yes, that is our way.
But he wants to know about testing ideas and how do you do that?

**Shaan Puri** (2:02)
All right, so we can share a couple of things that, I think you talked about this in the last One Question Friday, but the first is customer conversations and the mom test. So there's a book called The Mom Test, worth reading if you want to get better at this stuff. But here's the premise, which is talk to customers and the rule is don't make the mistake everybody does. Don't pitch your product and just wait for them to politely be like, yeah, sounds really interesting. Let me know, because that's like a positive. You're only allowed to talk to them about their problem. So you do what's called a problem interview. You just talk to them about their life, what they're, you know, in their business, whatever area your product's in. You ask them questions. You try to see A, is this a real problem for them?
B, how big of a problem is it? Like, dude, this is the biggest issue in my life right now, or it's nice to have. And you can suss that out by trying to figure out, okay, so what have you done to try to solve this? And if they don't really say anything, well, then it's probably not actually that big of a problem. They haven't been trying to solve it. If they've tried like eight solutions and none of it's working and they're just banging their head against the wall, you know it's a real problem.
And so you try to figure out the problem, you try to figure out how big of a problem and you try to figure out the words they use to describe it as a problem because that's what you're gonna use to create your solution. And then separately you could say, well, I'm working on a way to solve that. It'll be X, Y, Z.
Are you interested in trying it? And then they say, yes. You say, great.
And then you make them pay some price, whether it's literally paid money or give your information or connect your account so I can have your data or whatever. Make them do something that has some friction so you can gauge if they're really interested or not. That's one way you could test an idea.

**Sam Parr** (3:36)