Business Idea Validation

June 2016

Before spending a lot of hours and resources building a product it's smart to test whether people want your idea. We tested whether Sock Club was viable by launching a website before ever thinking about how to deliver socks to our customers. The technique of building a website as the veneer of your business before actually building your business was learned from the lean startup movement. It helped us be confident people wanted Sock Club and when we did finally launch we already had customers.

This technique of launching with just a landing page has been touted and used a lot. I want to introduce another validation technique that isn't as well known but has been successful for me. Google through it's keyword planner tool releases information on the amount a search term is searched every month. Using this resource you can check if people are already searching for your future product. We've been able to use this resource to grow Sock Club. We looked through a lot of sock terms and noticed that "custom socks" is search a lot around 11000 times a month. Searching "custom socks" on google gave a bunch of lackluster options for fulfilling a service people obviously wanted. We decided to launch Custom by Sock Club to take advantage of this underserved market. We've also targeted Dress Socks, Cool Socks, and Fun Socks

Custom by Sock Club has been super successful. It's growing faster than our main business. I owe some of it's success to finding an opportunity by using Google keyword planner.