🔮 You Can Predict If Your Idea Will Be Successful. Here's How.
Three methods for finding demand that every business owner needs to know.
Many of us have a lot of ideas. We just don’t know if they’re good ideas.
Wouldn’t it be great if there was a way to tell if a business would be successful before spending a lot of time and money to start it?
Today, I’m here to tell you there is a way to do just that.
(Some of us also struggle to come up with business ideas. If that’s you, don’t worry, you’re still in the right place.)
A big determining factor in a business’s success is how easily it will be able to acquire customers:
❌ If you can’t acquire customers, you don’t have a sustainable business.
❌ If it costs you too much to acquire customers, you don’t have a sustainable business.
❌ If you don’t have enough customers to break even, you don’t have a sustainable business.
Being able to acquire customers cost-effectively is really really important!
So, how do you know if you’ll be able to acquire customers without a herculean effort?
Demand.
Why Demand Is Important 📊
Most business growth activities can be categorized one of two ways: demand generation or demand capture. Either you’re creating demand for your product, or you’re capturing demand that already exists (even if you previously created it).
It’s so much easier to capture demand than it is to create it.
Imagine you run a phone case business. Someone is searching Google for cute phone cases and your ad comes up. That potential customer (the person searching cute phone cases) is already out there looking for what you sell. All you have to do is capture their demand by inserting yourself into their Google search process through an ad.
When there isn’t demand for your product, finding customers is an uphill battle. Before you can make a sale, you first need to convince someone that they need what you offer, and then convince them to buy it from you.
Capturing demand basically cuts that process in half, making it way easier. You only have to convince buyers to make their purchase from you. A purchase they already want to make.
Finding demand is all about finding proof that:
✅ There are people who want what you are offering.
✅ You have a way to reach them.
This is why one of the first things I do when assessing a business opportunity is look for demand.
Warning: Not All Good Ideas Have Demand
Before we continue, I need to pause and point out that just because a business idea doesn’t have existing demand, it’s not necessarily a bad idea.
Many beloved products today, like Ford automobiles and Dyson vacuums, weren’t in demand when they first went to market. Instead, these businesses were creating a new category requiring them to educate their market before selling.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with a business idea that doesn’t have existing demand to capture. It’s just going to be a lot more work to build.
Personally, I love efficient lifestyle businesses that don’t take years (or piles of money) to generate a return, so that’s what I’m focused on here.
How to Assess Demand 📐
Today, we’ll discuss three methods (with examples) for assessing if there’s demand for your business idea:
1. Look for Search Interest
The most important way to assess demand is to check if people are searching for what you offer. When I say search, you probably think of Google. And Google is an important search engine for a us to consider. But we make a lot more searches online than you might realize including on platforms like:
Google
Apple App Store
Google Play Store
Bing
YouTube
Amazon
TikTok
Etsy
And much more
It’s good to keep an open mind about where search interest for your product or service might be showing up. There are tools to help with all of these platforms and more.
Start by thinking about which platforms would make the most sense—both the obvious and non-obvious ones. For example, if I have a mobile app idea, I’m obviously going to check search interest in the mobile app stores.
But if my idea could also work as a physical product (e.g., a compass), I might also check Amazon searches to understand the broader interest better.
I already know it’ll be possible to get people who are searching the app store to download my app. But if I know other people out there might interested, I can plan marketing campaigns to try and reach them where they are, too.
Whatever platforms you’re considering, you’ll want to brainstorm keywords (things people might search for) related to your idea and do keyword research to evaluate them.
Consider the following:
Keyword
What phrases are people searching related to your idea?
Search volume
How many searches actually take place?
This is usually delivered as a monthly average.
Some platforms will only give you a score out of 100 (100 being very high search volume) rather than an absolute number, in which case you can compare keywords to get a better idea.
Trendline
How are searches trending? Is there a seasonal trend? Is search interest growing? Is it declining? Growing is better.
Region
If your business idea can only be operated in a specific region, make sure you narrow your research to that region.
Search Interest Example
Taylor Swift seems to get more and more popular every year and I’ve noticed a lot of people wearing Swiftie merch lately. I started wondering both how big this opportunity is and how competitive it is. I used Ahrefs to look up how many people are searching for different types of Taylor Swift merch in Google.
As expected many people search for Taylor Swift products each month. In the screenshot below, Volume refers to monthly searches in Google from the US and GV (short for Global Volume) refers to the number of monthly searches around the world.
What I didn’t expect is that these keywords are not very competitive. KD stands for Keyword Difficulty and is a measure of how hard it would be to get a new page to rank near the top of Google. It’s a score from 0 to 100, with 0 being easy and 100 being extremely hard.
This looks like a great opportunity for someone to make and sell Taylor Swift-themed merch online. If you decide to pursue it, make sure you’re creating original designs (like this In My Swiftie Era shirt), not copying official Taylor Swift products.
Check out my guide to learn more about how to do keyword research.
2. Look for Community Engagement
Search interest is the gold standard for checking demand, but it’s not the only way to build confidence that people want what you have.
While we do many online searches as a society, we don’t search for everything! And as more and more people are making searches in AI tools (like Perplexity) that are hidden from keyword research, we need to consider other ways of validating demand.
Finding communities that are engaging with topics related to your business idea is another great option to do just that.
Community Engagement Example
I’m part of a huge Facebook Group for women surfers (35K members). I’m also part of several other surfing communities on Facebook, Reddit, WhatsApp, and Skool. I know where to find a lot of surfers online.
Because surfing has been gaining popularity for a while, a huge portion of all surfers are beginners. Every day in these communities, I see people asking for recommendations for beginner-friendly surf breaks they can travel to.
Yet when I check for Google searches, I see none. I know there’s demand for curated information about beginner-friendly surf breaks but for whatever reason people are not searching for it using Google. But we know they are talking about it with their friends or in online groups.
Because of the strong community engagement on this topic, I wouldn’t have any hesitation about exploring it further. And while there may be other keywords I could leverage for organic traffic-driven growth, it doesn’t matter because I already know where to find my potential customers online.
Where to Look for Community Engagement
If you’re not already a part of communities related to your idea, start by finding them and making searches within those communities to see if there’s interest in your product or service. You can even take it a step further and start asking the community questions directly.
Facebook Groups: Communities on everything you can imagine and more. Just search Facebook for keywords related to your idea and see what Groups comes up. You can ever filter by city if needed.
Reddit: Communities for everything but usually they’re bigger and more aggregated than on Facebook. Use the Reddit search bar or scroll through the Best of Reddit to find what you’re looking for.
Quora: Find people asking and answering questions about every topic under the sun. You can learn a lot from seeing which topics get a lot of answers or upvotes. It can also be a good starting point for finding niche-specific communities in the replies.
Meetup: Find IRL communities. Great for local business ideas but it can also be a starting point for finding the online communities the same people are members of.
Niche-Specific Communities: There are thousands of independent communities online. Do some light Googling (search “your keyword + community OR forums”) and see if you can find any related to your niche. Here are some examples of what you can find:
What To Expect (Parenting)
Ravelry (Knitting)
Ars Open Forum (Technology)
Digital Photography Review (Photography)
RedFlagDeals (Commerce)
MacRumors (Apple)
Stack Overflow (Computer Programming)
Audio Science Review (Audio Technology)
Goodreads (Books)
AVS Forum (Audio Technology)
Rick Steve’s Travel Forum (Travel)
The Horse Forum (Horses)
Product Hunt (Startups)
Tom’s Hardware (Technology)
One interesting way of validating demand in online communities is to share a meme that captures the problem you want to solve and see if it gets a lot of engagement!
3. Look for Strong Competitors
There’s one more method I like to use to validate demand: find strong competitors.
Many people think strong competitors are bad, but I love them. When I see strong competitors, it tells me there are a lot of potential customers out there already.
That’s demand.
If I know that many people are already doing business with several other competitors, then I know all I have to do is find a way to differentiate so I can capture part of the market myself.
This method is useful whether or not you can find evidence of people talking about your idea in the form of searches or in online communities.
You want to find potential competitors and then assess how strong their business is. Look at things like:
How much website traffic do they get?
How many app downloads do they have?
How big and engaged is their social following?
What kind of press do they have?
What do reviews of their products say?
What is their revenue like?
How big is their company?
I’ll cover competitor research in more detail soon but in the meantime, Google is your friend! Do some digging and see if you can find other successful brands in your space.
Competitor Research Example
For example, I saw a baby proofing service as a business idea recently. I thought it sounded neat because it’s probably an easy business for one person with a car to start.
But I wasn’t sure if this is something parents would actually pay for. Maybe it’s part of the nesting process. Maybe most parents would feel comfortable doing it themselves. I didn’t know.
So I did some searching and it turns out there are many baby proofing services already. One of them—Baby Proofers Plus—has been in business for 30 years and claims to have baby proofed over 18,000 homes. That’s about 600 per year or a little less than 2 per day on average.
Thanks to Reddit, I even found a directory for baby proofers, further convincing me that parents will pay for this service.
The Baby Proofers Plus website, which serves my area, looks like it hasn’t been updated since it was created 30 years ago so I also discovered a good way to differentiate should I want to start this business: a modern website with online booking.
Coming Up Next Week 📩
Thanks for joining me today. Learning how to assess demand is one of the most important skills an entrepreneur can develop. I’ll be sharing more detailed guides on some of the topics covered here (like keyword research and competitor analysis) soon.
But first, we’ll move on to our next business opportunity: mobile apps! I hope you’ll join me for that next week.
Finally, I wanted to share that I’m testing out office hours for paid subscribers. These are 15 minute appointments that paid subscribers can use to ask a question or get feedback on something. For example, maybe you have a business idea you want to get fresh eyes on! Learn more and book an appointment here.
To endless possibilities,
Casandra
Thanks for the hat tip to Traction Design! And kudos for starting your advice from a place of demand first, not product first. This is critical and is the foundation of Traction Design. I’ll be writing about this more very soon.
Thanks so much for these great articles! Great insights and interesting data...