IDEA.SCREENING.LAB
How To Validate Your Business Ideas Before Building An MVP
Summary
There are many ways to approximate an idea's viability and validity. The best among them is SEO keyword data. Reason being is that keywords, by definition, represent the things people search for and why. In this article, we'll show you how you can make such a screening for your idea in easy and automated manner.
Idea Validation Using SEO Data
The prevailing wisdom today is: if you have an idea for a new business, you should test it out in the market to find out if it has any product-market-fit or not. The problem with this approach is that committing to building out an idea, be it a digital product or otherwise, is an extremely time and money-consuming endeavor.
The correct approach instead is to use a pre-screening method to filter out "bad" ideas before investing your time and money. Such a screening can be done by examining a wide range of applicable SEO keywords that could be applied to an idea while extracting the search volume, advertising cost, and a whole host of other factors. Think of it like Google Trends on steroids. The main difficulty with this approach is figuring out which keywords you should look at and how to find and document them.
Luckily, we developed Idea Screening Lab to automate this process. See this report as an example.
A Bit Of Background
For Lorenum, our parent venture studio that was recently founded, we have a list of 300 reasonably well constructed business ideas that we could try to implement. The problem is, as mentioned before, there is not enough time or capital to figure out which of the ideas is going to do well ahead of time.
So, putting our heads together, we developed an NLP engine that takes in a short description of a product idea and outputs thousands (sometimes tens of thousands) of keywords that could be applicable. Once we have this set of keywords, we cross reference it with Google's Ad Planner API data to figure out how many search queries each of the terms gets each month. Once this preliminary "keyword exploration" step is done, we follow it up with a data collection process that pulls in data from a variety of sources including social media networks like Reddit, Google Trends, etc.
This big data dump is then filtered, cleaned, and sorted in a way that makes it easily digestible. When coupled with a weighted scoring algorithm that we've developed internally, we now have a tool that allows us to pre-screen and validate ideas before investing any time or money.
As a simple case study, from our list of 300 ideas, over 100 of them turned out to have little to no demand at all. While many others turned out to be a lot more attractive than we could have ever imagined. Once we saw the value of this tool, we decided to open it up for anyone to use.
How does it work?
Simply signup and create your idea using the form shown below. Once you click the "create" button, the information is aggregated in real time for you based on your input parameters.
That's it! Once done, your report will be available for you to examine. See our community page for more build in public examples that were created by our community members.
Enjoy and good luck!
//The Lorenum Team
