Building Business Ideas That Succeed: How to Preflight Your Ideas

Do you have a great idea for a business?

Is there a new product you want to create?

To discover how to improve your chances for success, I interview Pat Flynn.
More About This Show
The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. It's designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing.

In this episode I interview Pat Flynn, the host of the Smart Passive Income Podcast, who blogs at smartpassiveincome.com and helps hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs and aspiring entrepreneurs build their dream businesses. His latest book is called Will it Fly? How to Test Your Next Business Idea So You Don't Waste Your Time and Money.

Pat will explore how to increase the likelihood that your next product idea is successful.

You'll discover ways to test and validate your ideas.

Share your feedback, read the show notes and get the links mentioned in this episode below.
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Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:
Building Business Ideas That Succeed
How Pat's architect background has helped him in business

When Pat started in online business, he taught architects how to take the lead exam. He shares that people reached out to him and thanked him for helping them in their careers, and he says that feeling was different from anything he experienced in the world of architecture.

Pat talks about what he did and didn't like about working as an architect, and how the long-term process of breaking a giant project down into chunks helped him when he started in entrepreneurship. He says the process of working hard on a building, planning ahead, and not knowing what it will be like until people are actually using it all translate to building and launching product.

Architects and entrepreneurs go through similar processes, Pat says. Each of them are building a solution for a client's problem. As you build it, you make changes, you pivot and you learn as you go. To be successful in any business you need to learn how to adapt and solve other people's problems.

Listen to the show to learn what software skill Pat used in architecture that he still uses in business.

Why Pat wrote a book about the pre-launch phase

In addition to Pat's weekly Smart Passive Income podcast, he does a show called AskPat, during which he answers a voice mail question submitted from his audience via SpeakPipe.

One of the most common questions asked is "How do I know if this idea I am working on is worth spending the time?" He tried to answer this question on both shows and found there wasn't enough time for him to cover the topic.

The topic was validated through an audience survey (Pat uses SurveyMonkey) in early 2015, when he segmented the people who said they had yet to start a business. By far, their number one concern was not wanting to waste time on something that might not be successful.

That's when Pat decided he needed to write a book to people with amazing ideas, that might be life-changing products or services, move forward.

Listen to the show to hear the reason behind the title of Pat's new book.

Making mistakes

Assumptions are great because they are ideas, Pat explains. However, if you act on those assumptions without knowing whether it's something people would actually pay for, that's when you have an issue.

Pat shares how a couple of WordPress plugin ideas he had turned into a $15,000 mistake. He didn't discuss the ideas with anybody because it was such a good idea, he didn't want to share it. Plus, he wanted to keep it a secret in order to have an awesome reveal on launch day.

Had he simply discussed these ideas with his target audience and people in his mastermind groups, it would have been clear that the idea was merely a starting point. He could have gotten feedback and turned it into something that would actually wo...