Hey Prompt Entrepreneur,
You now have a handful of exciting business ideas.
Now we’re going to kill your darlings!
Ideas are easy – we are starting to assess how well the ideas will stand up in the real world.
This will be a brutal process. But extremely important.
Validation and Refining your Ideas
1. Niche Analyser
You should now have a handful of ideas from the last Part.
Remember – ideas are cheap! You’ll have a lot. Even more now we can use ChatGPT to help us ideate.
We want to be ruthless and cut down our vague ideas into actual actionable plans. And then action!
We’re going to start this process with a prompt that will score our ideas.
Here’s the prompt:
Act as a business analyst
Provide a rating of each of these business ideas
Assess them on revenue potential, competitiveness, skill requirements, capital requirements, economic moat potential.
Based on this being a one person/small team business rather than VC funded.
Give an analysis of each point as well as a numeric score.
Then for each business idea generate a composite final score for its attractiveness.
Business idea 1 =
Business idea 2 =
Business idea 3 = I ran the prompt with
- AI-Powered Sustainable Learning Platforms
- AI-Driven Sustainable Urban Farming Kits
- Virtual AI Sustainable Living Coaches
Each idea had a full description attached. Give as much detail as possible from the last Part for ChatGPT to best analyse the potential.
💬 Prompt Output:
This is the output for just one of the ideas. ChatGPT generates an overall score – 6.4 out of 10 in this case.
Notice that the prompt is also skewed towards solopreneur/small team businesses. If you have access to funding remove this part of the prompt.
2. Test with your Audience
If you have an audience already then you should take your new business idea to them.
X/Twitter polls are a great way to quickly test receptiveness to an idea.
If you don’t have an audience yet then:
- I recommend getting started building one ASAP as it makes launching any business much simpler. I talk at length about the process elsewhere.
- You can simply use ads to get the reach you need on your polls. Post a poll and put $5 behind it on X and you’ll get the votes you need.
- Leverage my audience -more in the Premium Prompt.
Here’s a quick prompt to generate polls. Use it below the business idea prompt above or copy/paste in your business details alongside the prompt:
Give me 5 Twitter poll ideas I can use to test market demand for this ideas💬 Prompt Output:
Use these polls (and others) to start to gauge a baseline interest. You can also use polls to begin adapting your offer for what the market seems to be more interested in. Listen to your future customers!
3. Build an MVP
People’s words are one thing.
But the real (and only!) proof of whether a business idea will work is if people open their wallets.
Back when I lived in New York I won a Lean Startup Machine competition. It was a 3 day hackathon where we had to plan, build and sell a product.
We won not because our idea was the best. But because we went out into Times Square and sold the damn thing.
We made a handful of sales of a non-existent product – gathering their contact details and promising to send them it if/when it was ready.
We only made $7 but that was infinitely higher than the $0 all the other teams made.
Our grubby $7 showed actual genuine interest in the product – not just a vague “yeah sounds cool”.
You should build a basic version of your product and see if people will hand over cash for it.
I’m not talking about a fully fleshed out product. That’s a waste of time, especially if there isn’t a market for it.
Instead we build an MVP (minimum viable product). This is the most stripped down but still recognisable form of the product or service.
We then give it away in exchange for an email or ideally charge a small amount of cash. Even a single dollar.
Here’s a prompt to generate MVP ideas. Use this below the idea that you are working on:
Provide me with 3 detailed MVP versions of this idea that can be made in a day💬 Prompt Output:
ChatGPT generates a super basic version of the product/service that you are working on.
It retains the core value of the offer but in its most simplistic form. If people find this valuable then they are more likely to find your developed full offer valuable too.
Once you’ve settled on an idea go ahead and put together a super simple MVP. It should not take you more than a day. If it does it’s too complex.
If you get a good response to the MVP push onto the next phase that we’ll be covering in the final Part.
If the response is lukewarm or non-existent then roll back to idea generation and go again.
Seems time consuming? Sure. But not as much as if you spend months or even years building something that nobody wants! Better to spend the time building prototypes now than go all in on a losing idea.
4. Premium Prompt – Use my Audience
Free Trial – Premium
We’re providing a free trial of the Premium Prompts. Premium Prompts will be available for members only once our community launches. Stay tuned.
Bit of a different one today – it’s an opportunity rather than an additional prompt.
Share your business idea or MVP with me on X (@iamkylebalmer) and I’ll make sure it’s seen – on X, LinkedIn and in the community.
Just post the details and tag me and I’ll see it.
I’ll then re-post, specifically asking for feedback from others. If you don’t yet have an audience you can leverage mine.
Pulling it together
A small number of steps in this Part because building and launching an MVP is a big task.
Lots of you will be tempted to skip it. Don’t.
It’s the single most valuable part of this process and will save your countless months of pain in the future.
In the next Part we’ll look at building out the next steps and getting cracking on the full business.
A reminder of what we’re covering this week :
Part 1: Exploring Your Interests and Skills
Part 2: Getting Clear on Your Motivations
Part 3: Finding Your Niche
Part 4: Validating and Refining Your Idea
Part 5: Planning Next Steps