Your Community Idea Validation Workbook

WORKBOOK

Your Community Idea Validation Workbook.

TAKING YOUR IDEA FROM SO-SO TO LET’S GO!

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Validating your community idea If you’re an entrepreneur or creator, looking to launch a community, you want to be sure there’s sufficient traction for your idea before you invest time and money creating something.

The idiom “build it and they will come” is not, unfortunately, true. So how do you validate your idea and get confident that you’re on to something viable?

Follow our step-by-step guide to validating your community idea. Let’s start with the research needed:

1. Google is your friend

Google your topic/area of interest, note the key players/sites in your subject matter, note how many ads there are, go right through to pages 3 and 4 to see whether smaller independent experts are getting a mention or whether search is dominated by a few known brands/experts.

Next, google again, but this time refine your search by adding one of these words at the end, and note the results and level of expertise. Write some notes on your general findings/ thoughts. This will give you a general sense of interest level and degree of saturation and will also help you identify competitors or collaborators, which will be invaluable in defining your offer.

• Community • Forum • Membership • Blog • Expert

2. Book search Next type your phrase/topic into Amazon – are there books selling on this subject? Pay particular attention to the reviews – the detailed ones can give you invaluable insights into what’s missing, which might help spark an idea for how you can better serve this community

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3. Course search There’s a huge overlap between communities, memberships and courses. Many memberships and courses have a community element, so it’s good to know what’s out there already. You can achieve this by searching on Udemy, and also by adding Course and Certificate and Training to the end of your google search. Finding lots of results in this area is not a problem, it’s a validation that people need help in this area.

4. Social research Repeat your research efforts on social media. Look at FB groups and pages, Linkedin groups and pages – who or what keeps popping up. Look at Twitter, pinterest and Instagram and note down key hashtags in use here. Also check Buzzsumo and Social Animal – they’ll tell you which posts are being shared the most.

Pro tip: Don’t get disheartened at this point if there’s a world of experts in

this area already -you’d be hard pressed to find something that isn’t being covered, in this day and age - and if you do, it begs the question of whether there’s sufficient interest to warrant spending time on it, if nobody else is serving this sector (caution – finding very little on this subject probably doesn’t mean you’ve tapped a magical, unknown area just waiting for you to turn it into a million dollar business, it’s more likely lack of demand – that said, if you’re serving a very niche area of business, you don’t necessarily need huge scale to make it work, so allow these research efforts to guide you but not dishearten you).

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5. Your own marketing Now look also your own marketing efforts and successes if you are already active in this space – what are your most retweeted tweets, your most-opened emails, the blogs or articles you’ve written that are most read? Are these on topics that your community will address?

Do you get engagement from your audience in this area, do you feel you are solving a crisis for them?

Most popular tweets Most opened email/link-clicked Most popular blog, post or article Most popular podcast or video content etc What are the key irritations, frustrations, questions, problems and fears in and around your topic. Sometimes these key areas can help identify and validate your idea, but they can also form part of your content planning strategy too. If you can see recurring themes, questions or problems that aren’t being addressed, you can write blogs, posts, guidance, or create video content to address these issues.

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6. Offer differentiation A key part of the success of your community or membership is to ensure what you’re offering is unique and different. The more specific you are – the more you understand what they provide, the better able to position yourself uniquely.

Fill in the chart below noting their offer (eg community and course, coaching etc), the benefits they’re promoting, the hooks they’re using in their copy and the specificity in their language when describing the benefits – what are the adjectives in use

Competitor

Offer

Benefits

Hooks

Language

Value

When looking for differentiating features, consider the following potential ways to make your offer unique:

Differentials

Example

A unique process

The transformative trademarked system to….

By solidarity/community

The only community for…

A unique experience/approach

Scientifically proven to….

A familiar approach

The Netflix of xxxx (or The amazon of…)

By superlative…

The fastest way to…the cheapest way to…the easiest way to….

By personality/character

The most friendly….

By authority/experience/process

The tried and tested formula for….

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7. Craft your own differentiation

Who does your community target and what will it help them achieve? And how will it be different to existing offers – use the answers to fill in the blanks: This become ( oid)

(community/membership offer) will help ( who you serve) who they aspire to be) without having to (pain point they want to av .

Play around with your wording until you could comfortably tell a stranger and they’d understand the core principle of who you serve and what you’re offering.

Next Steps To test your idea further, you’ll need to start to speak to some of your ideal audience, and get some feedback.

Before you do so, ask yourself the following:

• Is your community or offer clearly differentiated from others?

• Do you have the experience/credibility/connections to position yourself credibly in

this space?

• Do you have existing customers/audience or access to existing customers/audience to test your idea on?

•

Is the “need” great enough for a great enough number of people – your members are busy, they belong to multiple communities already, are they sufficiently motivated in the area you’re serving to want to get stuck-in, and are there enough of them (see our shortcut to planning and designing your community for a calculator of audience size needed to reach your revenue goals) If you answered no to any of the above, that’s ok, but you may want to work on these areas before reaching out to your potential audience.

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