aka "The Bullshit Police"
The cheapest honest way to validate a business idea is to test the exchange itself, in three checkpoints run in order: about $50 of ads shown to 2,000 strangers to find out whether anybody is interested, a conversation that turns one of those people into a paying customer, and an evening of maths that tells you what a customer is worth paying for. Each checkpoint has a goal, and no more money goes into the next one until that goal is met. None of it needs a website, business cards, a logo, a funnel or a coach.
A business is an exchange. Swap a product for cash, or three hours of work for a deposit, and you have a business, and the difference between a business and a hobby is money. That is why this plan skips surveys and asking friends what they think. Friends are kind and surveys collect opinions, and there is no opinion as important as whether or not someone will actually give you money in exchange for what you offer.
The three checkpoints at a glance
| Checkpoint | What you do | Costs about | It passes when | If it fails |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Interest | Show one post about the offer to 2,000 strangers with a paid ad | $50 | Strangers click, reply or ask about it | Change the offer or the audience, then run it again |
| 2. A sale | Turn the interested people into conversations and ask for the money | A few hours | One person pays you | Stay here; until somebody pays it is a hobby |
| 3. The maths | Work out what one customer is worth paying for, and how many a month you need | An evening | Customers cost less to win than they are worth | Fix the cost of traffic, the value of the offer or how long customers stay |
What you need before the first checkpoint
Five things, and most of them are business rather than marketing: one place online where people can find you, a professional email address, a product or service to offer, people somewhere who want it, and a willingness to sell it. If one of those is missing, no amount of advertising will stand in for it.
Checkpoint 1: will strangers show interest?
The goal is interest from people who have no reason to be polite about your idea, and a first lesson in which words make them care.
- Write one post that sets out the offer or its main benefit: a headline, one image and a plain description of what the buyer gets.
- Set up a page and an ads account on the platform where your buyers already spend time. A Facebook or Instagram ad does the job.
- Show the post to around 2,000 people who should have the problem, and cap the total spend at $50.
- Ask for something small: a click, a reply, a question or an email address. You are not selling yet.
It passes when strangers show interest: some of them click, reply or ask about it, and you can see which words did it.
Stop and fix it if 2,000 people see the post and nobody is interested. One of two things is wrong: the offer needs changing, or the traffic is coming from the wrong people. Don't put money into the second checkpoint until you have fixed it. Change the headline, the angle or the audience and run the test again. The offer covers the first problem and traffic covers the second.
A failed first test rarely means the idea is dead. At 19 I was running a lawn mowing round and paying for flyer drops 10,000 at a time to feed it, and I tested colour flyers against black and white ones. Colour lost, and which of the two would do better was a matter of taste right up until the phone rang. The man who later wanted to buy the round had done a drop of his own, 4,000 flyers, and got zero calls. Mowing lawns was the same business in both cases. Mine worked because the flyers had effective copy and design, so what failed his test was the offer on the paper, not the idea of a lawn round.
Checkpoint 2: will a real person pay?
Interest is not money. The goal now is one sale to one real person, and you still don't need a website for it.
- Get back to everyone who showed interest and turn it into a conversation. An exchange of emails, a phone call, a visit, a coffee or a video call all count.
- Ask what they are struggling with, then listen closely and ask a few clarifying questions before you say anything about yourself.
- Offer your solution and explain how it solves that particular problem.
- Tell them what it costs.
- Ask whether they would like your help, and whether solving the problem is worth that much to them.
It passes when somebody pays. One sale is enough to move on, and a deposit counts, because money has changed hands.
Stop and fix it if nobody will buy. Don't spend on scaling and don't build anything yet. Go back over what people told you they were struggling with, change the offer to fit it, and have more conversations, because until somebody pays you have a hobby rather than a business.
My dad left a corporate job he had held for 25 years to sell classroom maths posters, and because he is quite a risk averse man he would not pay $70,000 for thousands of copies of each poster. He bought a wide-format printer for $27,000 instead and printed them one at a time, changing the product as he sold it. Every sale tested the offer before the next poster was printed, and the money went into a machine that could make one good poster rather than into a stack of thousands nobody had paid for yet.
Checkpoint 3: does the maths work?
One customer does not make a business. The goal of the third checkpoint is to find out what size the business needs to be to be viable.
- Work out how much one customer is worth paying for. Try it as a deal somebody else is offering you: if you could buy 10 customers at $100 each, would the business still work?
- Make that number your cost per acquisition (CPA) goal, the most you can spend winning one customer. Everything you spend to get that customer counts toward it, from the ads and the tools to the materials and your own hours.
- Work out how many customers a month the business needs at that cost to be worth running at all.
- Put in the real numbers from the first two checkpoints wherever you have them, in place of guesses.
Guesses are fine where the first two checkpoints gave you nothing better. The maths does not need every guess to be right, only for the errors to average out well enough that the total tells you whether the thing can pay for itself before you find out the expensive way.
It passes when you can win customers for less than they are worth, at a volume that makes the business worth running.
Stop and fix it if winning a customer costs more than a customer is worth, because spending more only makes the gap bigger. The options are specific: win customers more cheaply with better aimed traffic, make the offer worth more to the people buying it, or keep each customer for longer. Those are problems with names, and the diagnostic sorts out which one you have.
The round passed that test in the most literal way. When I sold it, the buyer paid 12 times a week's takings, which is what a validated exchange looks like from the outside: somebody else willing to pay for the customers you have already won.
After the third checkpoint
A growing business needs more and different resources at every size, and every new channel, price or audience gets the treatment the first offer did, a small test, real money, and the arithmetic checked before the spending goes up. Validation covers checking the numbers once the business is trading, pulling the traffic lever covers scaling the traffic once the exchange is proven, and showing up in search without paying for each click is one source of that traffic, with its own framework at Opportunity + Authority. The equation puts both levers together: Traffic + Offer = Results.
Each checkpoint costs the same kind of nothing, fifty dollars of ads, a handful of honest conversations and an evening with a spreadsheet. What they buy is the right to spend real money later, on an exchange you already know holds. Marketing can't create a business from nothing, but once the checkpoints have come first it can grow one that already works.