What's the most important step in starting a business?

Don’t begin building your business until you’ve done adequate research and validation.

The oldest story in the startup world is the founder who has a “great” idea and begins building the business before doing the important step of researching it fully.

It’s easy to make this mistake. REAL easy.

But you need to be smart, and resist the temptation to just start building. 

It’s tough because the easiest thing, with the least amount of friction is to just start building without the research and validation. It’s natural to simply begin moving forward with your idea because it sounds good to you, and you’ve probably received good feedback from friends and family.

But stop. Don’t do it. Yet…

Those who have been there and done that know that there are a lot of important questions that you should ask yourself before you begin committing time, energy and hard dollars to the process.

It’s important to ask yourself questions like:

• Will this business idea be able to meet my needs financially?
• Is this something I believe in enough to commit a few years of my life and a chunk of my own cash to?
• Do I have a good idea of how to market the business so that I can attract customers?
• Who are the competitors?
• Are there any at all?
• Are those competitors succeeding?
• Do I have the knowledge needed to succeed?
• Am I absolutely SURE that there are a lot of people who want to pay me for this product/service?
• How much will it cost to start this business and can I find the money?
• Will I need to get investors and will they believe in me?
• Will I need to assemble a team to build the business?
• What do guesstimate financial projections look like? Will I be able to earn a living or pay my bills?
• What is happening within this industry? Is it growing or dying?
• How will I market the business?
• How much cash will I need to keep the business alive until it becomes profitable?
• and many others…

Remember, once you really commit and decide to move forward, you’ll be investing a year or two of your life – at a  minimum – and probably thousands of your own hard-earned dollars. 

You’ll be trading that time you spend working on the business for time with your friends, family, hobbies, health, etc. So it’s a big decision, one of the biggest probably.

You owe it to yourself to make sure that you’ve done your homework and things have checked out.

A great place to start is with our free Business Idea Evaluation Quiz here – takes a few minutes and will give you a good idea about whether your business has a good chance of succeeding or not.

Here are several other pages with excellent information about how to test and validate your business idea – and the steps you should take BEFORE you commit to your business:

Testing and validating your business idea