Get Ready to Reboot Your First Business Idea

Fun fact…70% of startups pivot or make significant changes to their business model pre-product or service launch. 

Even though you’re pretty sure you understand the market and what’s driving it, take one more step before hitting up potential investors. (If needed, take a step or two back to sizing the market or validating top shelf trends)

Take the time to do the all-important initial gut check and run your idea by some friendly fire first. The goal is to talk to people likely to be more focused on the quality of your idea rather than its immediate investability. This includes industry peers, business smarties, and other people who just have solid common sense. Their feedback can help confirm your thinking or show you where you may need to finetune.

Start with friends in the industry. These women know your business. They can pretty quickly sniff out if the way you have identified the problem, or the solution doesn’t smell right. And women want other women to succeed so much you know the input will be direct, so get ready to hear it. Keep in mind, if this group is highly corporate, they may lean towards the “it can’t be done” camp. It’s tough to see that disruption is inevitable when you are steeped in the norm. That’s ok. Leverage them to make sure your read of the market is correct and to verify that your business idea has potential to successfully address the market opportunity. Turn your listening ears off after this. These discussions inevitably devolve into “why this will never work” lectures tinged with a bit of self-doubt on why they aren’t already doing this themselves.

Next, go to your smart business peers. These by far are our favorite conversations. With 58% of entrepreneurs finding advice from professional networks “highly beneficial” (Source: Forbes), sounds like we are in good company. Your supportive female network will of course start on an overwhelmingly positive note – think, “Oh, we don’t know anything about this industry, and you will be successful at anything you try.” Keep pressing further until you unearth those insanely perceptive comments painstakingly learned from their own business experience. Some of these come out of left field. All are extremely thought-provoking. Tapping into this audience is more about helping you “zhuzh” up your idea rather than make radical directional shifts.  

Keep an open mind and be ready to consider real changes to your business idea. You will have to filter through some of what gets said in these conversations, and it might be easy (and even prudent) to dismiss some of the thinking that materializes. However, keep your ears open for a few potentially disruptive ideas. (We literally just had this experience with The Female Maverick when a brilliant friend asked why we weren’t specifically targeting female, primary breadwinners, which 40 percent of all women today are. I mean how did she have that stat at the tip of her tongue?) Collaboratively iterating with smart people is never a waste of time and usually leads to at least a tweak or two that will improve your idea. If nothing else, the experience will give you practice pitching and prepare you to go investors with greater confidence.

What’s Next?

Drum roll please. Next is the moment you have been waiting for: talking to potential investors. While you won’t be asking for money just yet, you will be asking for validation that your idea can make you money – lots of it – and that’s just as valuable at this point as the dollars you will ultimately secure.