One of the biggest mistakes of failed entrepreneurs is coming up with a product/service that THEY BELIEVE is in demand, which is based on perception or personal influence. Time and money are spent working to produce a product offering and when brought to market, they find out that their prospective customers really don’t care for the idea. So how do you avoid this without putting too much capital at risk? The answer is to test your idea by pre-marketing to your perspective customer. There are many ways to test your idea to understand if it is not only sell-able but also sustainable. Even if your strategy is to ride a trend with an exit strategy to sell your company in a short time, you need to test market your idea and then take the feedback to either redevelop your idea or throw it in the trash and start again. In our first of seven “Lean Startup” series, where we focus on how to come up with your business idea and how to test its attraction to your intended customer. We focusing on using technology to gain insight and to test market an idea. This session will help you take an existing or new idea and creating a model that is sustainable for long term growth. 1) Coming up with an idea (Brainstorming and attracting your most valuable skills) Note: Ideas generating worksheet provided 2) Researching your idea (Using the internet(social media channels, forums, blogs etc to gain intimate knowledge of what your competition is doing and improve your offering.) 3) Testing to see if your idea sells (What is your idea worth and can it sustain. How can you pre-sell your idea as if it’s already ready to market.) Your call to action is to take your idea and further test market it to your prospective customer. Based on the research and feedback provided, you would be much better positioned to create something that has more value than where you started.