How we tested a business idea and what we learned in the process - part 1

tl;
dr
My friend and I didn't have an idea, but we really wanted to try starting a business together. The original plan consisted of interviewing a few people inside a segment, coming up with an idea, testing it using the cheapest ways we could find, and making an estimated guess whether the business idea has a future or not.
Phu Quoc, Vietnam
2022

In the spring of 2021, I decided that I need to try building a business of my own. I figured that the path of least resistance would be connecting with a friend who has an easy way into a segment of people united by the same job.

This thinking brought me to my good friend Ivan Proskurin who had been running a successful wedding photography business for a few years. Ivan was very receptive to my ideas (thank you!), and very soon we "officially" started doing business together. Ivan's participation was crucial not only as an industry expert but also as a shortcut to relevant respondents of the target segment. We have described the segment as 20-30yo female newlyweds in St. Petersburg and Moscow (later the segment's size got pushed further down to only those who were employed at the time of the wedding).

We didn’t have a business idea in mind - we were mainly motivated by the prospect of developing new skills and improving existing ones. From the very beginning, not having a fixed solution seemed more like an advantage rather than a problem: the longer we go on without a product idea, the longer we remain clear of bias and clouded vision.

Here's what our plan was:

  • find a niche and a loosely-defined segment (check);
  • find a way to reach representatives of this segment (check);
  • talk to them and extract the most common jobs-to-be-done, problems and pain-points;
  • think of a realistic solution that would execute a common job-to-be-done better than existing solutions;
  • describe our solution using a Tilda landing page as if the product already existed;
  • launch a Facebook Ads campaign and measure our projected Revenue and Customer Acquisition Cost;
  • revenue - CAC = ?;
  • if we like the value of ?, then build an MVP, if we don’t like the value of ?, try something different.

We thought that the two main advantages of this plan were:

  1. We were mostly spending time, not money, at least until reaching the “build an MVP” step.
  2. We didn't really have to think too much - simply ask the right questions, carefully listen, and then transform everything we learned into something that we can sell. Then measure, approximate and calculate stuff. Deceivingly simple.

The next post of the mini-series will cover user interviews, formulating jobs-to-be-done, and defining the solution.