In a perfect world you could spend you know minimal amount of money and understand whether or not you're on to something whether or not the idea that you're pursuing is something that folks other folks are interested in other folks want to pay for and is worth your time and energy to pursue these days you can do a lot of that inexpensively so first step the first thing you can do is just throw something out there in front of customers these days that might mean a landing page some you know minimal marketing materials like a printout or a flyer something that you can communicate to would-be customers what you're thinking about what you're working on and throw that in front of a sufficient number of people such that you kind of get a sense of their level of interest it might mean you know get 500 or 5 000 visitors to a landing page that you throw up there maybe buy some google adwords or some online marketing from some channel drive some traffic and see if the resulting actions that those visitors take meet your expectations it might mean design something on a screen put it on an ipad and go walk it in front of 10 people and just ask for their feedback some of it might be really measurable some of it might be just anecdotal but get a sense of kind of what people think a usability expert named jacob nielsen calls it hallway usability testing you get 10 people you throw something in front of them and with about 10 people or he says even i think five to seven you get about 90 of the information you might get if you had a larger sample.

So that's the first thing just throw something out in front of customers see what they say and then of course gauge the response you know how many folks provided an email address you know for those folks who visited your landing page or how many survey respondents did you get and what did they say and as i said before some of this will not be scientific it'l be and some of the stuff will be kind of anecdotal comments you'l have to ask yourself does this validate my hunches did i hear something that i didn't expect and then based on that you should refine or drop your idea either you proceed with total confidence knowing that you're absolutely onto something or you further dig into something that is concerning and you know you should be really honest with yourself about this do this really hard work up front spend lots of time really understanding if what you're working on is something that people want before you spend lots of time and money and i think those are some really good ideas on how to kind of validate a business idea these aren't earth-shattering concepts.