You want to start a healthy home-cooked meals business. Your first thought is to rent a kitchen, buy equipment, design a name and packaging, and build a website for taking orders. After a few months and several hundred million toman spent, you finally find out how many orders you get a day.
If on that day you see two orders a day, you’ve spent all your savings on something you didn’t yet know anyone would buy.
Your business idea is only a guess
Your business idea means you’re guessing that a group of people has a problem and will pay to have it solved. Until someone actually pays for it, it’s only a guess, even if all your friends say it’s a great idea.
Building the product feels like progress, because designing a logo and building a website are tangible things. But as long as you have no customers, you’re perfecting something that nobody may want.
How do you find customers before you build?
- Write your guess in one sentence. Write down exactly who has what problem and how much they’d pay to have it solved. For example, “office workers in this area will pay 200,000 toman a day for a healthy lunch”.
- Sell the simplest version. This week, cook a few dishes in your own kitchen, announce them in your neighbourhood and work group chats, and take orders by hand, with no name, no packaging and no website.
- Look at the money, not the compliments. People saying “what a great idea” proves nothing. Look at how many people paid, and how many of them ordered again the following week.
- Build once customers come back. When a few people have paid several times, that’s when to rent the kitchen and build the name and the website.
What if nobody buys?
If nobody orders, all you’ve lost is a few days and the cost of the ingredients, not your whole savings. Change your guess and try again, with a different group of customers or a different price, for example.
This matters most for anyone starting a business with their own savings, because if they get it wrong there’s nobody to put money in a second time.
When should you write a business plan and a canvas?
Once you’ve found a few real customers. At that point the business model canvas helps you see where the money comes from and where it goes, and a one-page business plan helps you decide about renting the kitchen. Both are only useful when they’re written about real customers, not about a guess.
And if you want to start a business but don’t know how to test your guess cheaply, in a free diagnostic session we will work it out together.