Building a Community

www.ryrob.com

and Validating Your Idea

Craft an elevator pitch for your idea.

with Ryan Robinson

Build a community and validate quickly.

Lesson 3:

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Lesson 3: Building a Community and Validating Your Idea

1. Researching to craft an effective elevator pitch.

Before you reach out to your friends, family, co-workers, former classmates to begin getting feedback on the topic area you’re going to build a business around, you need to have a succinct description about what you plan on creating. This is your elevator pitch. The 2 - 3 line description of your upcoming solution.

Your elevator pitch doesn’t need to be perfect at this stage, but it’s your best guess at an appealing solution that offers unique value to the people you’ll be reaching out to (to pique their interest).

In order to craft an effective elevator pitch, you need to start by researching your competitors and identifying areas of opportunity—the aspects of their solutions that frustrate you the most.

If you already know who your biggest competitors are going to be (hint: you probably uncovered them in the Day 1 Challenge worksheet and through the Niche Market Demand Checker), list them below, along with your #1 biggest frustration about their solution that you’d like to improve upon.

If you still aren’t sure who your biggest competitors will be, do a Google search for 3 - 5 of your top keyword phrases (think: “best hikes California,” “bay area hikes,” and “hikes in LA” as examples from the hiking website I validated during my challenge). On the first page of results, you’ll see all of the biggest competitors in your space who are vying for top spots in organic search results—this is where you’ll eventually want to be.

Now, list your top 3 - 5 competitors below and highlight their biggest weakness, shortcoming or most irritating personal frustration you have with their solution you’ll be competing with.

Company Name

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

Let’s move on to crafting an elevator pitch that highlights both your strengths and the weaknesses of existing solutions in the marketplace.

Biggest Weakness, Shortcoming, Opportunity

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Lesson 3: Building a Community and Validating Your Idea

2. Crafting an elevator pitch.

During my validation challenge, I found that most of my competitor websites in the California hiking space had mediocre content—an area of serious opportunity given my personal strengths of writing and a deep interest in hobby photography.

Here are a few of the biggest weaknesses I identified with my competitors:

• Images were often stock photos • Written content was short and overly generalized (i.e. for tourists, not devoted hikers) • No exciting content mediums (i.e. drone photography, 360˚ images, video footage)

By highlighting these aspects of my upcoming solution, I’d be showcasing how I’m building something unique in the marketplace—that addresses one of my own personal frustrations. Creating my feedback group will help me determine whether or not this is a frustration for others that are interested in hiking in California as well.

Here’s the elevator pitch I came up with, based on emphasizing these points:

Hey [First Name]! I’m building a new site I thought might be up your alley as a fellow adventure junkie.. it chronicles all of the best places to find adventures in California, go on awesome hikes and capture unique photos from each spot while you’re there. I’ll be grabbing photos, videos, drone footage and 360 cam images to make this really awesome. Would you be interested in getting updates on this?

It’s short and straight to the point. It ends on a question—asking this person whether or not they’d be interested in getting updates on my project—which will qualify them as a member of your feedback community.

Now, it’s your turn.

Take your first pass at an elevator pitch that highlights your unique value propositions within your industry. Spend no more than 15 - 20 minutes on this. Done is better than perfect and your value propositions will likely be changing over the next couple of weeks as you get more feedback and your idea takes shape.

Want feedback on your elevator pitch?

Email me at ryan@ryrob.com and I’m happy to help!

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Lesson 3: Building a Community and Validating Your Idea

3. Building your feedback community prospect list.

Now that you have an elevator pitch that quickly describes the problem you want to address and what makes your solution particularly unique in the marketplace, we’re going to build a prospect list of all the people you’ll soon be asking to join your feedback community.

Open and make a copy of the Pre-Launch Subscriber Prospecting List so you can save it as your own private document and continue working with it throughout the rest of this course in your Google Drive folder.

Next, start adding the right prospects to your list (without actually texting, emailing or calling them yet).

Before adding a prospect to your list, take a moment to think about whether or not the person is actually within your target market for this project. You don’t want to waste time presenting an idea they won't be interested in.

With my validation challenge in the California hiking space, being within my target market meant that each person I reached out to needed to (1) live or frequently spend time in California and (2) have a somewhat active lifestyle, which would indicate to me that they'll probably be interested in adventuring and hiking.

The types of people you should be adding to your prospect list.

Using a quick mental filter of a couple relevant questions to verify whether or not you believe each person you come across would potentially be interested in your idea, start thinking about these types of people who would be easiest to get in your feedback community.

•. Friends • Family • Co-workers • Former co-workers • Other professionals you’ve met or networked with • Classmates or former classmates from school • Teachers or past professors •. Members of any clubs, groups, societies, meet up networks, online communities you belong to

Now, let’s start populating your list by doing the activities on the next page.

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Lesson 3: Building a Community and Validating Your Idea

4. Populating your prospect list (existing connections).

Again, we’re going for the path of least resistance.

At this stage, that means starting to populate your prospect list with people you already know who may be interested in learning about your upcoming solution. Start with these activities to begin adding prospects to your list and check them off as you go:

Scroll through your text messages

Browse through Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram messages

Look over your last ~100 personal emails

Examine your LinkedIn connections list

Check your Facebook friends list

Go through the contacts in your phone

Think through the co-workers who may fit

Revisit the people you engage with in groups, clubs, societies and online communities

It may take some time to compile your list—expect to spend up to an hour (or more) building this prospect list if it’s not immediately clear that tons of your existing connections will be excited about what you’re building.

It’s also completely possible (and OK) that you either may not have a large personal network, or the network you do have wouldn’t be that interested in the topic area you want to build a business around.

In that case, you’re still fine. You’ll just spend less time reaching out to people you know and allocating more time to outreach through online communities, in-person events and more—which we cover with detailed strategies, conversation scripts and more in the full 30 Days to Validate course.

For this challenge, your goal is to get the size of your prospect list up to around 25 potential feedback community members that you already know, today. From these 25 prospects, we’ll hope to land your first 10 confirmations—the foundation of your first email subscribers for this project.

Note: There’s no one-size-fits-all number of feedback community members you need to validate any business idea. Some, like a freelance or consulting business (B2B) can be validated very quickly by pitching your services to just a handful of the right prospects. Boom. Done. Other businesses that are consumer product-based, digital or website driven may need the full 100 community members to validate with. If you’re not sure which number fits your type of business best, email me at ryan@ryrob.com asking and I’m happy to help.

Here’s a snap shot of what my prospect list looked like during my validation challenge (click to expand):

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Lesson 3: Building a Community and Validating Your Idea

5. Outreach to your prospects (existing connections).

Before getting started with your outreach, let’s mentally prepare for how this is going to shake down.

You’re going to hear some no’s.

Some people probably won’t respond at all.

Your feelings might get hurt initially.

But here’s the thing—none of this should be taken personally. Think about how busy you are. All of the different demands you face on a daily basis. The requests for your time at work and at home. People are busy.

Remember, these are people who WANT to help you. If your friend reached out to you for feedback or to pitch you an idea, would YOU want to help them? Of course.

Don’t take any no’s, non-responses or “that’s dumb” replies as anything other than your prospects being busy, not the right fit for the idea you’re pitching, or simply that they’re projecting their own fears or insecurities onto you in some cases. You have to develop thick skin and commit to pushing past early rejections & failures.

Time to start reaching out and getting your first 10 - 25 subscribers.

Start with text messaging, phone calls, in-person conversations, sending emails, Facebook messages and any other form of direct communication where you can succinctly communicate your elevator pitch and ask each prospect to join your feedback list. Update your Pre-Launch Subscriber Prospecting List as you go.

Here are some examples from my challenge:

(click to expand image) (click to expand image)

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Lesson 3: Building a Community and Validating Your Idea

6. Rinse, repeat and start building a competitive advantage.

Work your elevator pitch on your prospect list for the next few days (limit yourself to 1 week of outreach) and work towards building your list of subscribers who are interested in getting updates on your idea.

Great business ideas aren’t just invented out of thin air—they’re built with the people you’re helping—and before you can expect to have a profitable business, you need to build the community of people you’re helping.

Have real conversations with them.

Take your prospects to lunch. Grab coffee with them. Pick up the phone and call. Learn more about their challenges, as it relates to the niche you’re going to build a business within.

Find opportunities to solve real challenges they’re facing—ones you have experience with tackling for yourself.

Truly listen to them and they’ll suggest ways you can help. Like this…

Start expand a bit on your elevator pitch and pull some more insights out of the feedback you’ve been gathering from your conversations with the people in your community.

All with the purpose of developing a competitive advantage that’ll make your upcoming solution uniquely valuable to your audience. The worst thing you can do is rush to market with an identical solution to what’s already out there.

A competitive advantage is defined as your unique advantage that allows you as a business to generate greater sales or margins, and/or acquire & retain more customers than competitors.

In short, it’s what makes your business, your business.

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Lesson 3: Building a Community and Validating Your Idea

7. Refine your competitive advantage.

Your competitive advantage can come in many different forms, including:

• Your cost structure

• Product offering

• Distribution network

• Customer support

• Your own personal skill set (like being able to tell great stories)

• Your experience

• Industry knowledge

• Strategic relationships

• A powerful personal brand

• Large and engaged audience you’ve built

The strength of your competitive advantage will greatly affect your early results in validating your business idea.

With my challenge to validate a business idea in the California hiking space, my competitive advantage for my upcoming website (that didn’t yet exist, mind you), was that I’d be delivering content in a new medium (VR/360°), with a level of quality and depth that was unmatched in an industry full of web 1.0 style websites with stock photos and short descriptions.

To land on the competitive advantage(s) for your side hustle idea, start by carefully combing through all of the feedback emails, conversation notes and ideas you’ve recorded from your target audience conversations.

Look for commonalities, trends, surprising insights and particularly interesting ideas that catch your eye. Highlight them as potential value propositions to come back to for developing your competitive advantage.

Now, you’re ready to move into building your proof of concept and launching.

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Lesson 3: Building a Community and Validating Your Idea

8. Building a proof of concept for your idea.

Now you have a small (but growing) audience. You know the specific offering you want to validate your business idea with. In my case with the validation challenge I did, that was an off-the-grid hiking guide to the most under-appreciated adventure destinations in California—documented in VR/360° and drone video.

But I didn’t have the time to go out and shoot all that content, get it edited and HOPE people paid me for it. That’d take months and probably a good amount of money.

Instead of pausing here to invest weeks or months into building your course, writing your book, developing an app or creating a complex website to highlight your freelance skills, we still want to make sure there’s a (paying) demand for what you plan on building—before you actually go out and build it.

That’s where building a simple proof of concept comes into play.

A proof of concept is a realization of your method or idea that demonstrates its feasibility.

Here are a few examples of the many different forms a proof of concepts can come in:

• Google Doc (like the one I created to validate my hiking guide)

• Blog post (like the one I wrote to validate my first course idea)

• Explainer video

• Portfolio of your existing work (like this free one on Contently)

• Hand-built prototype (like my $100 iStash prototypes)

• Simple product sales page or website

• Rough demonstration of your software solution

• Email or email newsletter (like how ProductHunt started)

• Self-published book

• Facebook or Slack group (like #Investing, a group created by a reader)

So, going back to leveraging my core skills (which we covered the importance of in #2 of this post), I took a couple of hours and wrote out a simple Google Doc Proof of Concept that was just a few pages long, to serve as my proof of concept for this hiking guide idea.

You can check it out and grab the template for it right here

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Lesson 3: Building a Community and Validating Your Idea

9. Launching and getting pre-orders.

You’ll need a secure way to accept payments from your subscribers before asking them to buy.

That could be as simple as asking them to PayPal you the dollar amount, using a free card reader from Square to accept CC payment or setting up a simple product page on a platform like Gumroad (I chose this option for my validation challenge).

Next, set a realistic price point for your solution. Know the value it’ll provide, but be sure it’s a reasonable price point that’ll reflect the fact that your customers likely won’t be immediately getting the solution. Since this is a pre-launch, I suggest building in a discount that incentivizes your prospects.

Getting your first sales.

Your first sales need to come from manual, individual conversations with your subscribers. You can’t mass email a link to your proof of concept or sales page and expect people to immediately buy (or even understand the value in buying). Text, call, email, meet with your most engaged prospects and ask them to buy.

In my challenge, I turned to using my Feedback to Pre-Order Sequence (you can download the copy/paste email scripts right here) I use to pre-launch courses and other products.

Here’s how the Feedback to Pre-Order Sequence works:

Step 1: Ask the person to check out your proof of concept and complete a short survey leaving feedback about it.

Step 2: Genuinely answer their questions (from the feedback survey) and ask them if they’d be confident enough in your [product] to pre-order it at a discount today.

That’s it. So simple it’s ridiculous.

Important: In the survey, it’s incredibly important to ask the yes or no question of whether or not they’d buy this [product]. You can prioritize your time on the people who pre-qualify themselves as being interested in buying.

Meet their objections head on and be honest about whether or not you think your solution will be a good fit for them based on the feedback they’re giving you.

Focus on turning each of your prospects into a paying customer.

If you truly believe in your idea, it won’t feel weird asking people to buy.

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Want feedback?

Shoot me an email at ryan@ryrob.com.

I’m here to help.

Ryan

Lesson 3: Building a Community and Validating Your Idea

What’s Next?

Keep reaching out to your prospects one-on-one, continue getting feedback and asking the people who express an interest in what you’re building, to pre-order your upcoming solution.

If people are willing to pay you for your idea, you’re on to something.

If you can’t get anyone to give you that vote of confidence with their wallets, your idea may not solve a real problem—at least for the people you’re reaching out to.

Consider whether you’re having an audience or solution problem.

P.S. I put together an entire course that walks you through the process of validating your idea.

It’s called 30 Days to Validate and it’s been pretty great for the students who’ve gone through it. Here’s what a couple of them have to say:

If you want to join, I’d love to have you. Let’s get started right here.