Verify your Business Idea: 4 Tips for your Proof of Concept

You want to start your own business and already came up with a promising Business Idea? Congratulations, you are going toward the right direction. If you don’t have a Business Idea yet, then check out this article. But before you continue with your journey it is crucial to test your idea to see if it can actually live up to its expectations and fulfill the customer needs. That’s what a PoC, short for Proof of Concept, is all about. In this article we will explain what a PoC exactly is, why it is important and how you should carry it out.

Definition Proof of Concept

With a Proof of Concept you test your theoretically worked out Business Idea. This means you examine in detail if your product or service can truly meet all customer requirements. The bottom line is: Does your idea work? When starting your own company it is inevitable to do a PoC before you elaborate your project further. When doing a PoC you will be able to answer two questions:

• Will your product or service be feasible: Can you put it out in the market?
• Will your product be profitable: Are there people who are willing to buy it?

If the outcome of these answers is positive then you have verified the potential of your idea and can move on to build your first prototype.

A Proof of Concept gives you a perfect opportunity to invert your whole idea and to scrutinize it. The feedback you gain can also prevent you from investing too much resources in case your product or service idea is not paying off and you have to reconsider your Business Idea.

4 Tips for your Proof of Concept

1. Do Market Research
   A proper market research is key to understand the market’s potential and challenges you want to operate in. Collect as much data as possible and clearly define your gap in the market. With the discovered gap you will be one step closer to pass the PoC.
2. Identify Buyer Persona
   The only way to be absolutely sure about whether your product will conquer the market is to identify your buyer persona and their specific needs. Be sure about if your product is a solution to a pain point in the market or a great enhancement of an existing product that your target audience can benefit from. Ideally you have already identified your target audience when you came up with your idea in the first place and now only need to prove again that you are still on the right track.
3. Gather Feedback
   Continous feedback is decisive for your startup during a PoC. A good idea is to interview your target group to see how well your product is received. Their feedback is worth a mint as you can directly translate into action and carry out alterations so that your product fits the market’s demand.
4. Present Business Idea
   Be brave anough to go out there and visualize your product. Why don’t you start with your own website or you could also create accounts on Social Media and start raising awareness there. The reactions to your posts will give you a good overview and estimation of your product-readiness.

What’s next?

Were you able to pass the PoC and could verify that your product or service meets all customer needs and demands? Very well done! But what happens next? The next steps would be to start building your first protoype. Don’t give your hopes up if the first attempt doesn’t work and you have to carry out some alterations to fit customers’ wishes. Also keep in mind that your prototype doesn’t have to be perfect yet as it is the first approach of your market-ready product with the desired features and characteristics. A more elaborated and mature version of your prototype would be a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). It is still not the final version of your product but you can test the market-readiness with potential customers.

We hope that we could give you a good overview of what a Proof of Concept is about and why it is so important. If you are about to start your PoC then we keep our fingers crossed. You can do it!

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Author: Kathleen Bier
Online Marketing & Project Management

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