In this fourth part of the series of our ‘Navigating the world of entrepreneurship – Are you ready to start a business?’, we look at validating your business idea and that is testing your idea and concept in the real world. This includes methods of testing your idea such as proof of concept, prototyping and much more.

This step involves the process of testing a product or service before it’s finalised or launched. The aim of business idea validation is to expose your potential product or service to the end user and see what response might be prior to launch.

Before you launch your business, develop your product or service further, it’s crucial for you to test your idea in order to have a better understanding of the solution that you’ve created or come up with. There are various ways of testing your idea or product such as follows:

• Coming up or developing a prototype (preliminary version of a product)
• Proof of concept (evidence or demonstrate the need for the idea, product or service)
• Pilot testing (experiment the idea to a small group of users)
• Minimum Viable Product (MVP) which is a version of a product with just enough features to be used by early customers to provide feedback.

We hope you found the above information enjoyable but most of all helpful!

If you’ve missed any of the series of our ’Navigating the world of entrepreneurship – How ready are you to start a business?’, discover them here.