Validation Challenge Day #1 Discover a Profitable Niche and Estimate Market Demand This is a preview from the full course, 30 Days to Validate where you ll get my easy to follow, step-by-step system for going from zero to first paying customers in the next 30 days. Ryan Robinson
1. Warm up questions. Our purpose for uncovering your interests before pursuing a market opportunity is to make sure that it s wellaligned with how you ll be spending countless hours in the near future (building your business). Building a business needs to be fun and in order to enjoy it, you need to be genuinely interested in your business and the problem you re solving. This worksheet is going to help you get to the bottom of that. Approach these questions with an open mind. Give yourself as much time as you need to allow the right answers to come to the surface. If you get stuck on a particular question, just skip it. The answer may come to you later don t force yourself into answering based on lofty expectations for yourself. 1. What is an interest or dream from your childhood that you still find exciting? 2. What s the absolute best part of your day? What feels most meaningful, enjoyable, fulfilling? 3. Do you have any hobbies? If so, what are they and would you do them every day if you could? 4. What s one achievement that would make you feel most proud of yourself? 5. What is a deeply held value of yours? Do you have any principles you choose to live by? Why? 6. If you had to choose just one thing you want to be remembered for after you die, what would it be? Why? 1 Ryan Robinson
2. What are 5 things you find easy to do? We tend to be interested in the things we re already good at. And because we re good at them, these activities often feel very easy for us to do. What comes easy to us may be much more difficult for others. These are the activities that rarely feel like work, even if they re actively engaged within your day job. Don t overthink this, but be as specific as possible in your answers. For example, instead of writing down something like photography, write down taking beautiful landscape images or taking creative portrait photos. These activities could be as simple as giving your friends relationship advice, making your own sushi, hiking intense mountains, or writing in-depth blog posts about your experiments in nutrition and fitness. Don t limit yourself at all in this activity. If your answers are all over the map, that s ok. For inspiration, here are a few things I find easy to do keeping in mind that they weren t always easy for me: Writing and sharing my experiences through blog content with a friendly, authentic voice Long-distance running Waking up at 4:30am to get a head start on the day Starting conversations and making quick friends with new people I meet Talking good friends through difficult career decisions Not coincidentally, I find that I regularly engage these activities in my life. Now, it s your turn. Write down 5 things you find easy to do. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 2 Ryan Robinson
3. What takes up your free time? This can be a tricky one. You need to first differentiate between the things you need to do and the things you want to do, as a component of the activities that take up the majority of your free time. While it s likely that some of your must-do s and want-to-do s are one and the same, the way you feel about them (and whether they feel like a responsibility or a desire), will tell you a lot about whether or not these are true areas of interest for you. For me, I spend a huge amount of my free time writing content for my blog. I love doing it, so it s a want, yet at the same time, it s arguably become a need for me. New content helps me provide more value to my existing audience and gives me the opportunity to reach new people that can benefit from my experiences. Thus, writing is both a want and a need for me. On the flip side, an example of a free time activity that s purely a need for me, would be cooking dinner. For you, these are likely completely different. Now, share with me the 5 activities you do most frequently outside of work, and classify them as things you need to do, or things you want to do. If they qualify as both, that s fine too. Need to Do Want to Do 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Reflect. Let s take a moment to look back at the last few pages. Are you starting to see any patterns emerge? Are there any commonalities, trends, patterns or surprises beginning to emerge? 3 Ryan Robinson
4. Identifying the patterns. Starting at the beginning of this worksheet, go back through and re-read what you ve written down. Revisit what you find easy, how you choose to spend your free time, the feedback from your friends. Are there any recognizable patterns or recurring words & phrases you ve mentioned? When I first went through this activity myself, I was actually surprised to see how often I found myself bringing up the theme of wanting to be in the outdoors more. I ve always loved hiking and experiencing the beauty of the wilderness, but I had never considered the idea of seeking a business idea with that area of interest. An outdoor-related business would allow me to earn an income while spending time doing something I love. Whether there are any surprises from doing this activity or not, I want you to write down your top 3 areas of interest below. Next, I want you to rate your degree of interest in each of them, on a scale of 1-10. 1 would represent a very minimal amount of interest, and 10 would be something you could do all day every day. For me, hiking in the outdoors is a serious interest. But, it s not a 10. I d give it an 8, because there are other things I enjoy doing more at this point in my life and I still feel the desire to live in a city, which limits my ability to easily get out for a hike. Now, it s your turn. Areas of Interest Level of Interest (1-10) 1. 2. 3. 4 Ryan Robinson
5. Estimating market demand. It s great to pursue an interest area you re motivated in it s even better if you re solving problems you deeply care about. However, in order to build a business around your solutions, you need to solve problems for more than just yourself. Let s estimate how many other people are searching for solutions that are related to your top interest area. Open the Niche Market Demand Checker. Make a copy of this spreadsheet so you can edit and save your work. Enter 5-10 keyword phrases related to your top interest area in Column B. These keyword phrases should be the first search ideas that come to mind when you think about the interest area. With my interest area of hiking in California, the top searches that immediately come to mind are identifying the best hikes. Next, click on the link in Column C to run a Google search of your keyword phrase. This will show you how many search results are identified as being related to this keyword phrase these will be your competitors. Take note in Column D of how many competing search results appear for this keyword phrase. If there are tens of millions (or more) results, that s a strong indication that other websites & businesses are monetizing that keyword phrase somehow. It s likely a profitable topic area. Finally, click the link in Column E and you ll be taken to an estimate of Monthly Search Volume on SEM Rush. This is their estimate of how many people are searching this exact keyword phrase each month. Take it with a grain of salt since Google keeps their data very well-guarded, but it s a good directional idea of MSV. Record the number of monthly searches from your SEM Rush estimate in Column F and select the corresponding level of demand in Column G for each keyword phrase. Once you add up the total MSVs in Column F for your 5-10 keyword phrases, you should have a total of at least 5,000-10,000 monthly searches for these keyword phrases. This indicates that there are likely enough people searching for solutions around your topic area, to build a business around. If you re in the high hundreds of thousands or millions in MSVs, you re not niche enough focus down on more specific segments. 5 Ryan Robinson
6. Deciding on the right niche. After you ve used the Niche Market Demand Checker spreadsheet to determine how much market demand there s estimated to be for your top 3 interest areas, it s time to decide which one you ll be validating a business within for the rest of this course. You don t want to pursue a niche that s too small (most typically, less than 5,000 monthly searches for your 5-10 keyword phrases) unless you have strong reason to believe that each person you help within that niche could have a very high per customer value. On the other hand, you don t want to pursue a niche that s too large (most typically, more than 100,000 monthly searches for your 5-10 keyword phrases) where you ll instantly be competing with huge, established brands that have already built strong businesses to address broad problems. The right niche opportunities are somewhere in between. Your goal is to create a solution that appeals very well to a relatively small, like-minded group of people. That s how you build a brand for yourself within a niche you can grow from there and slowly address larger and broader opportunities in the future. For now, let s operate in a niche and find a very specific problem to solve. Instead of choosing an interest area of career advice (245,000,000 search results), think about something much more specific like, career advice for millennial women (781,000 search results) that will significantly help you differentiate yourself. There are around 40 Million women in the U.S. aged 18-34, so that s still a very large niche. You could niche down even further by focusing solely on, career advice for millennial women in New York City as a starting point if you live in the NYC area. Let s update our top 3 niche interest areas with their corresponding total MSV and levels of demand. Niche Interest Area Total MSV Level of Demand 1. 2. 3. Which niche interest area looks most appealing? Which one are you now most excited about? Choose one to pursue validating for the rest of this course. And remember, this isn t a life-long commitment, it s a 30 day test to see how the market responds to your idea. My Niche is: 6 Ryan Robinson
Now that you have your niche, you ll need to start connecting with your target market. You want to learn about their challenges, hear their frustrations and identify opportunities to create meaningful solutions to the problems they re telling you about. You need people. Let s start building your email list. (Beginning with just 10-25 subscribers.) Day 2: Building Your Email List This is a preview from the full course, 30 Days to Validate where you ll get my easy to follow, step-by-step system for going from zero to first paying customers in the next 30 days. Ryan Robinson