Welcome to the digitally done podcast.

Episode three, and my name is Nikki Kelly and I am driving, but yet I have navigators with me joining me, Lizzie McCauley and Sam Witch. And today we're going to be diving into validating your idea. Last week, we had a chat about,  What is your thing? What is the thing? What is the digital thing that you are going to put out there?

We have an idea. We want to go nuts with it, but we've got to validate it now. So there's a number of levels of validation. So let's just dive straight into this and ask Sam, first off,  what's your idea on validating your idea?  So it's funny, I come from like a government accredited world, so validation is quite a formalized structure, but it doesn't have to be.

I know it's a thing that scares a lot of people. I think really, and for when we were talking about this, validating is just about making sure someone wants it. Like cool, I've got this idea to like, it's got any legs. Is this even a thing or is this just a random idea I've had? And so validating looks different in lots of cases, but it's really the question of, does anyone want this?

And that's sometimes a hard question to face, face on. It brings up a lot of fears. And I know Lizzie was talking before about like some of the conversations she has with people where she's like, you've got to go talk to people about this, but that's, I think that's really what I think validation is. 

Oh, yeah, there can be lots of hesitation about, but  nobody wants to fill in my form. Nobody wants to come and give me feedback. Nobody was like, well, You're making decisions for people before they've had the opportunity to make decisions for themselves. So how about we make it irresistible to them to give you that feedback so that you have the data you need to know whether you will need to go further.

We need to refine your ideas, go back to the drawing board. Like what are you supposed to do aside from get information about where to go next? Otherwise you'd be in kind of a holding pattern for forever, right? That's not good. It's part of a self fulfilling prophecy, right? If you don't put out the form, no one answers it.

Like no one will ever answer my form. Well, if you don't put it out there, then they won't.  The old in it to win it thing, right? You can't win a lottery if you don't buy a ticket.  That's right. Exactly. You know, there's that momentum too, that you,  I think a lot of people, they go through that, you know, we're all excited about our idea and everything like that.

And that's, it's almost some, I think overcoming that fear of validation is a stopping point. Cause it's not. All it's doing is actually giving you that extra momentum further on from there and actually filtering your idea. So, you know, I think putting those questions out there and I'd love to ask you ladies, what are your ideas on how to get validation from. 

The audience and also where  can you get validation from Lizzie? Can you answer that question for us? Well, why it's also, before we go there, I think Sam has some amazing ideas on this. I think it's also important to understand why, like what validation are you getting? Like we're right at the starting point.

If you've had this vague idea, I want to build a course. I want to, you know, whatever, make a membership.  But you don't necessarily, it's a chicken and egg thing is what we were talking about before we started recording about. Okay. Well,  I, I have an idea for a course and it may have these 10 components,  but then you need to take it out to people to see if those are the 10 components that they're actually  having trouble with needing support with, I suppose, to, in order to tailor and shape.

The thing you actually spend all of this energy and all of this time pulling together on something that is going to be received immediately. And the fastest way to do that, I suppose, is to is to get that information right away. Well, Lizzie, with your audience that sometimes the thing that you know, they need and the thing they think they want a different, I think it's like my kids and vegetables, right?

They don't want broccoli in their dinner, but I know they need broccoli in their dinner. So I'm trying to find what they think they want, but inside of that, I've got to hide the bits. I also know they need. Oh my goodness. I mean, that, that is the 101 of, of messaging in my space at the very least is, is sell them what they want, give them what they need.

I know that's kind of a, an old trope, but it's still as relevant today as whenever it first was released into the wild. Because, especially I work with a lot of people in kind of the coaching and wellness and, and I suppose kind of this, Softer skills quite often, and it's very difficult for a lot of them to sell their stuff when compared to, let's say a business coach, where it's like, well, I'm going to make you 10, 000 this week.

Cause that's such an easy, like, Oh, okay. That's tangible. So having to sell people on where they're up to right now is a surprisingly complex task depending on your skillset or it can be.  So really actually talking to people and seeing where they're at so you can articulate back to them what they say that they want and internally inferring  what they actually need and building out the course in a certain way.

Because yeah, maybe sometimes. And it's totally ethical. So I don't want to get into like gray area, but maybe sometimes what your marketing says and what the inside actually is might be slightly different.  Yeah. And not that you're not delivering your outcomes because  yeah, you definitely would, right. But it's the additional underlying like story that you're feeding them and the stuff that you're giving them, like.

If I only, right, we go to our audience and we validate our ID, but if I went to my audience, my kids and said, what's for dinner, I know nine times out of 10, it would be pizza or nuggets. Right. So cool.  I know that now, but also I like, I can feed my own stuff into that as well. And I think part of the validation conversations we have a lot with courses is go to your audience, talk to them, get their words, like find out where their pain points are.

And now that we know that. We can build the thing that's most useful for them, helping them with what their pain points are, with what they think they want, while building the underlying supporting message of what we know they need to help them through that. Exactly.  So all to go back to the actual question  that Nikki posed, it was like, where do we go?

I think you have some amazing ideas on that, Sam. I really enjoyed your, your like, where you were going with that before. That was cool.

Where do you put your ideas on that side?  So validation, I talk a lot to, to clients and students about validating. Cause I think courses have such a interesting rep, which you'll just build one, right, Rome, just build it and they'll come and we all know, I see all of us nodding at the same time. It's nearly not what happens.

And so I really encourage my audience to actively go and validate a course. There are lots of ways you can do that. Yeah. I'm a big advocate for getting on a call and talking to someone about it because you hear their actual words. The things that fall out of their mouth when they don't mean to say it are the real gold, not the formulated answers they've typed into a survey, which can be handy, but the things that kind of just spill out when you're in casual conversation of where those, those really interesting bits of conversation lie, I think which are really helpful for us.

And also what I imagine what they don't say or what their body language and the face facial. Which is my imply that, that, you know, there's no substitute for being in a room with someone or at the very least face to face with somebody. So you can actually read what it is that they mean versus what's coming out of their mouth sometimes. 

And you can see how long it took them, like the questions, which were harder to answer when we, and surveys are great. And I'm sure we'll talk about that in a sec as well. Right. But what I don't see in a survey is how long it took them to like, analyze that answer and type it in and, and what they went through, the pain that they went through to write that answer down.

But I do see that if I'm talking to them on a call. So like my priority for, I think, Valuable validation would be to really like run a couple of free calls, make it super valuable for your audience. I've done this personally. I say, look, I would love to pick your brain. I want 10 15 minutes of asking you a bunch of questions and in return, I'll give you half an hour of my time where I answer anything you want about the stuff that I talk about.

So like I'm doubling the return that they get for the time that they give me. It's like a moment, no brainer for most of them. Cause. You know, they save the money of paying for a one on one session with me, but I get some really great goals at the beginning of that. I mean, next best would be surveys.

Build yourself a landing page with a wait list. Take a deposit. I know something we spoke about a little bit earlier, getting to put some money on a line. A little harder if you're still really validating the beginning essence of an idea. But if you've got an audience of raving hot fans, they might be willing to put almost like a Kickstarter, a bit of money down to see what the idea is and where it leads.

As long as they know you're going to give the value back. There are definitely options there as well.  And that's, you know, the whole, like my perspective of things with beta testing comes in, that's the whole form there. Like you're just getting validation there on your product, your offer, whatever it is and that is that form of survey that, you know, you're putting it out there, but one thing I wanted to add in there too, was, you know, getting that validation across is, you know, you're, you're finding out what their pain points are, making sure that what we want to create is for what they need, obviously, you know, you're building it, but.

You've got to make sure that it's something that they need, like the solution you're creating is actually a solution, not just something that you're putting out, you know, digital dust, whatever they call it. And so when, you know, I think one thing that we should pose out there is whatever we're asking validation on. 

It's those questions that we're asking, making sure we're asking the right questions and spending time to really work out what those questions really are and what they validate. , you know, sometimes we, we, you know, we were talking about what, what it is that we're putting out there. What is  the digital that we're putting out there?

Is it a course? Is it a coaching program? Is it a membership, whatever it is, right. Ebook, whatever it is. , The questions we're asking have to make sure that it's,  we're creating a solution for the pains that we're discovering from our audience. , and also it's the, how they want the answers delivered to them.

I think that's something sometimes we talk so much about the topic itself. But it's, how do they want the solution delivered to them? Sometimes some people learn in that, you know, cohort environment, that community environment, feed off each other sort of thing, or is it a hierarchical thing where they want to actually be taught?

 They get actually get taught what to do or the steps to take.  Like that sort of thing is something to also find out about too. What is the system they want to actually learn the solution through. And I think that's a really interesting point because we can go into validation with quite a fixed idea of what we want to offer, but if you can go in with a really open mind of like, cool, this is what I think you want, But talk me through where you're stuck.

Talk me through in an ideal world, how I'd get you out of that spot, what you want that to look like for me, it was, you know, I'm a course creator. So ideally, right. I'd build a course, but actually my audience want more support than that. They don't just want me to tell them what to do, although they kind of do, but they want me to be there for them.

And that's where things like membership models come in, because what they want is to pay to be around me for a period of time so I can help them, but then leave when they're done, because actually they don't need me at that point in time. They're done now. So it was really interesting for me, essentially, you'd think the course creator creates lots of courses and I do.

But my audience actually didn't need a course at that moment in time. They wanted more support than that. And when I talked to them about that, I was like, Oh, that makes sense. But I had gone in with a very course focused lens because that's where I spend my time. But if I hadn't have had open eyes and be willing to see or listen to what they were saying about support mechanisms, I wouldn't have changed my mind. 

I think,  sorry, Nikki,  I think there's a real Awareness of ego that's required in this, in this topic, I suppose, in this specialty, this skill that, that we're talking about today, because it's really easy to say, I've got this great idea and you guys are going to love it. It's going to be amazing, but we're not being, as you say, not being flexible and open to the possibility that.

I could be rejected, but also that, , there might be a better way of executing it and keeping in mind things like learning styles time constraints, you know, like not everybody is going to be able to watch a three hour lecture. , or not everybody wants to receive information that way. Some people, you know, obviously there's the different learning styles that people learn by doing or by reading or by hearing or whatever.

, So part of that, because you were asking earlier, Nikki, around what questions to ask, or you were sort of talking around that is,  you know,  being clear about the needs and commitments of the people you're trying to, trying to serve as well. What do they, what do they want? What are they trying to achieve?

And what capacity do they have to engage with you? That will lead to what sort of thing you build and put out into the world in the end. Right.  And that leads me to the next question. I'm going to direct it to you, Sam, is what are your thoughts on  having, you know, we validate the idea, we're talking to our audience, but how about validating our own time and effort that we want to put into this digital thing? 

What are your thoughts? You know this, which is why you've asked me, but I'm a really big advocate for making sure like whatever you're building fits. Somewhere I work with a lot of business owners who come not as a fresh slate, not as a startup, but as an established. Business. And so for me, putting a digital something out into the world, isn't just about picking something willy nilly and throwing it out there, but it's about the bigger business strategy of it.

Like what are we trying to do with this? And it's something that's really interesting to ask your audience as well. So the question I normally ask someone is what, what are we building? Is it a free or low entry products to build your list? Are we looking at a mid level offering for people who can't afford you yet?

You're looking for an expensive product to feed people up into. So you've got something to sell. Next, what are we trying to build here? But it's part of that validating the idea with your audience as well, which is  At what point do they feel they get stuck? Do they get stuck before they think you, they can afford you?

Are they stuck at the beginning and they're just poking around. So just want some answers, but they're not really sure who to invest in yet. And they stuck, but they're willing to throw money at a problem now, because they're super stuck. Like when we validate an idea, it's not just where do I want it to sit?

Like, I want to build this VIP high end program. I'm going to sell it for 20 grand a pop. Cool. Awesome. But if your audience thinks they're stuck with like, hang on, I'm just poking around and asking some questions and I'm not really sure yet. Then they're not ready to buy a 20 grand product either. So pilot validation for me is definitely about what do you want?

Where does it fit? What are you offering? How is it for your business strategy? But then again, going back through that validation process, or at the same time as that validation process and making sure that is actually suitable for your audience, not just for you and your business. Because if the two don't align, you're not going to make any sales. 

Exactly. And that takes you through almost like a funnel process too, in the sense of  what you're offering. Is it a high ticket? Is it a low ticket? Where are you taking them? That journey sort of thing. And where is your effort sort of plunking in at that point? But I'd love to ask you, Lizzie, on that one, cause you're just ready to be bursting there. 

What are your thoughts in that area? Cause I know you've got a whole heap there.  Well, it's funny because I've actually spoken to your people in your space about this exact thing in that there's different language choices we use depending on how much trust, trust, excuse me, that we have built up with our audience.

So the more trust we've built, the closer we can come to asking for the sale, essentially. , so I suppose part of this validation process might well be around.  Your timeline as well. How much time are you willing to dedicate to building in air quotes? Forgive the right audience for the offer that you are looking to pull together as well.

, and ultimately, yes, we're all in the same boat of saying build the thing that suits you best, but. The timeline on that might vary greatly if it's a 7 offer to a 7, 000 offer like the, you could, you could maybe pull something together quite quickly for 7, but building that level of trust that somebody is going to come along on the journey with you to something that's thousands of dollars might take a bit longer.

I don't know. And then your language choices  from, from point  zero onwards are going to affect  how quickly that process comes together too.  And that looked like literally that flows into the whole marketing, right? Because you're a 7 product is, is targeted at a different market to a 70 to a 700 to 7, 000 and validating, obviously, again, it's like, who are you actually validating this with, like, what do you really want to get out of that and match it obviously with your time, you know, what.

You know, level of, , investment you're going to put into yourself, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah. I would love to ask with, you know, with what we're trying to work out here, the whole validation side of things. , And Sam touched on this before, like, you know, there's that survey cycle that you can go through and obviously validation, you know, you use your bookend on your offer.

It's a validation start, it's a validation at the end to see if there's a review and revise, but, you know, what about the whole thoughts on  waitlists, pre selling, all that sort of stuff? What are your thoughts there on that one? I'll go with Sam on that one first.  Picking on me today. I am. I have some strong viewpoints on pre selling that I've done a whole couple of podcasts on so I'm not going to rant about that as much here because we don't have the time for that.

My problem with pre selling only because I know a lot of big sort of people in the course industry will tell you to pre sell it and then just build it, , is that courses tend to take a lot more time to build than you think they do, especially if it's your first one you're building. And so my only concern with pre selling is if you've never built a course before, it's very easy to over promise and under deliver.

Because you're like, I'm going to build this course and it will be with you in three weeks. And we'll do this whole eight week program. And no, it won't. It just fire festival of the course world. Oh my God. Yeah.  Yes. So I'm all for taking a deposit. I'm okay with pre selling if it's your second or third course. 

Or if you have built the first module first and you know how long it took you to build that damn module. Because if you've at least gone through the process of building worksheets and recording videos and putting them in your platform and you know roughly how long it took you to build that bit, you can extrapolate and make a reasonable suggestion.

I am forgetting people to put something on the line. So even an email address for a waitlist is something right. And Lizzie will know that like that takes the trust of putting their details into a form. Like we're already getting them to actually put some skin in the game. So waitlists, pre sales, those sorts of things are really valuable.

But yes, if this is your first course and or whatever the thing is you're building, I'm really tentative about pre sales only because I know it's very, very easy. When you don't know just how long it's going to take you to build that thing, to over promise and under deliver. And it's very easy to burn the trust of an audience when you over promise and under deliver.

And it's not something any of us feel comfortable doing.  And then that trust is kind of gone that you don't get it back. You know, what's really hard to rebuild.  That was it. What are your thoughts on that side of, you know, the whole pre sale side of things? Like, you know, you can put content out, have a landing page, bring people to it, wait list, things like that, but translating that into possibly a pre sale or, you know, to get validation there.

What are your thoughts?  I think it's a really interesting topic and I really respect Sam's Sam's perspective and really sound advice on, well, if you're going to commit, be sure. You know, like know what you're selling rather than just kind of, well, that's validation itself, right? Know what, what the outcome of that presale, as far as what you offer, it's going to be.

That makes total sense.  It's great to have the data. Let's say you do have a wait list. It's great to have the data on  whether that wait list fills up or not. But it can be discouraging if it doesn't, you know,  and that doesn't necessarily. 

It could mean that the messaging is not quite there yet as well. So once again,  back to the validation drawing board of like, what am I saying is this, is this hitting the mark? Or am I missing the point? Or maybe, yeah, maybe I didn't do enough homework in beginning. You know, not to dwell in the negative, maybe your wait list fills up and it's amazing and everybody wins.

We do talk a lot in the marketing space around building the runway. You know, like you don't even have to have a product to start building the runway to selling the product. In fact, it's important that people know that it's coming and build that anticipation and understand something's exciting and it's building and it's building and then it's going to be, Oh, I got it right.

Yeah,  I absolutely love that. I think when I say pre sell it's because I'm used to an audience. It's being told you build a landing page. You say my course is coming. It's gonna be a thousand dollars. Pay me a thousand dollars now. And I think that's very different to building a runway of saying, Oh my God, this thing's coming to build.

And now I'm taking a wait list and now we're starting to pre sell like. It's a really different process to just taking all cash up front and then having that looming expectation of needing to deliver really quickly. I love the idea of a runway cause it's so I mean, one, it builds that excitement, but it too, it's so much more sustainable. 

Yeah. And also you can bring people on the journey with you that potentially, like, I think there'd be some people that go, Oh no, I want to keep it all under wraps. I don't want to share it, but you could be the type of person to say, Oh, and I filmed all my content today and look, this is me all done up.

Cause I finally got my, Face on  and you can, you can build a lot of character and, and rapport with that. And that's a different type of trust of like, she's just like me. Or  they are just like me. They're, they're on the same journey. Like, yes, it's coming. And I'm starting to see glimpses of like, she's really, she, they, them, whoever, he, whoever  have really put a lot of effort into this.

They put a lot of themselves into it. And God, I really want to get my hands on that when it comes.  Oh, yeah. So that's one approach. And I quite, I find being brought along the journey quite a satisfying feeling. It's like, I, I, I'm rooting for you. I really want you to win. Oh, and by the way, I really want that too.

So, you know, that works on two levels. So, you know, it's, you know, it depends, I suppose, on your approach. And if the experience that you've seen and, and I've seen it as well, Sam of, well, just give me the money. It's going to be fine. Yeah. It's a high trust thing going on there. So there's a lot of marketing involved in that.

It can work if you've got a really warm audience, you've got a track record building, you've got a track record providing, nothing wrong with a pre sale, but I'm just cautious.  Here's the word, cautious.  And like it's rounded all up, like  bring all this back together again, I guess it's that whole validation side of thing is it's, you're validating not only your offer, but you're validating the market that you're marketing to, you're validating what effort you're going to put into this.

And you start creating that sort of. Potential business model that you're working with and towards. But one thing I did want to sort of point out at, at that point, like going back to, from my perspective, that whole beta testing thing, like we took validation to like a whole year and a half before we even released the product.

Of putting it out there and we did, you know, our R& D was just a massive amount of questions, surveys, everything, obviously, based on because of the investment we were putting in it financially and mentally and all that sort of stuff too. So sometimes there's that,  you know, equilibrium of, you know, the amount of validation you need to take out or put out there. 

Based on what the offer is that you're putting out there as well. So that's another thing to sort of look at, but with respect to feedback too, I think in that, and this will lead to the next episode when we're talking about, you know, the whole marketing side of things. But one little point of advice that I want to put in there and I'm going to ask you girls to what little bit of advice you might have just around.

This is my side of it is.  Whatever you're putting out there, stick to, if you can, your minimal viable segment, as well as just the product. So you've got your MVP, your minimal viable product that you're going to put out there. Keep it simple. Don't overdo it. And the same thing with your market, don't try and reach the whole world with your market, concentrate on the smallest segment.

First, once you get that right, you can scale from there. And that scale can take on a number of different levels. So I'm going to ask the same thing of you, Lizzie. What's your little point of advice that you might have with respect to validating your idea? Actually, I'm  not stealing anything too, too drastically, but don't get caught in the validation only cycle.

I have a lot of people that I've seen in small business over the years who have been stuck in waiting till things are perfect or waiting till things are proven beyond all doubt. And the thing about.  Small business in particular is that it's never perfect and there's always doubt.  And if we waited for the perfect opportunity, then we would be waiting very, very long time.

And in the meantime, that means that there's lots of people who are missing out on our genius and the things that we really can support them with. So it's. It's better to have something than nothing. It's better to have something perfectly well validated than that. But you know, somewhere on the spectrum in there lies exactly where it's time to take action. 

I think that's super valuable advice. I kind of a mix of all, but I'm going to say, don't let anyone poo poo on your validation parade. It's really easy when you're validating to have a chat with one person who hates the idea or someone who's like, no, it should be this, not that. I mean, that's cool, but.

That's one voice in many. And I mean, Nikki, it kind of fits into your, you can't please everyone. Like validation is a process, but you don't need to take every word to heart, but because you'll get stuck. If you interview 10 people, they will say 10 different things. And then you can't try and please all of them with the product you're building.

So validation isn't about like getting the right thing. And, and Lizzie used her air quotes earlier, right? It's not about right. It's about sort of testing the waters and seeing what's happening, but don't let anyone. Yeah. Poopoo on your validation parade, but just because someone said, nah, that's a terrible idea.

One voice doesn't make an answer.  Unless it's all the voices.  That's a bit different. 

Thank you so much. I've, I have loved this chat. Yes. Again, that we have on our weekly basis and validating your idea is a hard one. And it's one that we just got to Suck it up and go, all right, and just read what the results are from it. And it's just review and revise. It's not an end all and be all. So validating your idea is obviously a very important part of the process.

Thank you so much for your time, Lizzie McCauley and Sam Lynch. And I'll thank myself as well. On the digitally done podcast. You'll have our summary below in our podcast notes, as well as a link to our form. Lizzie, would you like to provide a little question for this week that we can get guys working on?

Maybe that can work way with an action point, an action point. That's it. One of those.  Yep. That's the one. Yeah. Well, why don't you write down  five questions?  that have no ego in them  that you would like answered in regards to your digital thing.  I like that idea. And we'll have that little prompting now summary as well.

And we'll have our little form where we do have a link to a form that we would love your feedback, any comments, any suggestions. Any ideas where you're at in your journey on sharing your digital thing out there with the world? Again, guys, thank you so much for coming on today or as we do every week.

And our next one will be touching on marketing. And who knows what else we'll end up diving into.