Found a great way to easily test your business idea using Twitter!

[Sven]

Recently I launched my website in beta and I wanted to acquire some users to start testing my service. So I started small by trying to get some followers on Twitter, but from scratch it's not that easy to get valuable followers. So I started to directly search for people Tweeting about the problem my website tries to solve and helping them, and that works great!

So how does it work?

About the process
1. Identify the problem you solve with your product
2. Find the right search terms that people use to Tweet that problem
3. Send a Tweet to these users with your solution for them, this does not have to be a link to your service. Better is to give a short Tweet that directly solves their problem.
4. If you do well people will be extremely happy because someone they don't know helped solving their problem. They will follow, retweet and/or favorite!
5. Learn how to even better and quicker solve their problems and extent your reach
6. Try to automate the proces step-by-step so you can offer solving peoples problems by using a website or app or whatever and earn money with it!
7. You now have tested your product and put it to the market!

Now what are the effects of this process?
a. You test the potential of your service in a quick and free way
b. You get immediate feedback from the users (not days of waiting)
c. If people like it you will get your first followers and customer base
d. It's fun solving peoples problems and gives a kick to see your idea works! It's a really good motivation if you're in your early stages of development and cannot test your product/service in the real world.
e. You learn to adapt your way you solve the problem really fast! Like the Lean startup cycle, but very short!

To who is it applicable?
Not to every idea, service or product but to ideas that solve problems you can solve within minutes. It's ideal if the problem gives a small piece of information and you give information in return. It must be possible in the end to automate the proces you take.

I'm still using this to improve my service and the feedback helps a lot. When I'm further in the process I will try to post sone results!

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[Jon L]

that's very interesting. I'm going to try it with my business.

 

[Imgal]

Recently I launched my website in beta and I wanted to acquire some users to start testing my service. So I started small by trying to get some followers on Twitter, but from scratch it's not that easy to get valuable followers. So I started to directly search for people Tweeting about the problem my website tries to solve and helping them, and that works great!

So how does it work?

About the process:
1. Identify the problem you solve with your product
2. Find the right search terms that people use to Tweet that problem
3. Send a Tweet to these users with your solution for them, this does not have to be a link to your service. Better is to give a short Tweet that directly solves their problem.
4. If you do well people will be extremely happy because someone they don't know helped solving their problem. They will follow, retweet and/or favorite!
5. Learn how to even better and quicker solve their problems and extent your reach
6. Try to automate the proces step-by-step so you can offer solving peoples problems by using a website or app or whatever and earn money with it!
7. You now have tested your product and put it to the market!

Now what are the effects of this process?
a. You test the potential of your service in a quick and free way
b. You get immediate feedback from the users (not days of waiting)
c. If people like it you will get your first followers and customer base
d. It's fun solving peoples problems and gives a kick to see your idea works! It's a really good motivation if you're in your early stages of development and cannot test your product/service in the real world.
e. You learn to adapt your way you solve the problem really fast! Like the Lean startup cycle, but very short!

To who is it applicable?
Not to every idea, service or product but to ideas that solve problems you can solve within minutes. It's ideal if the problem gives a small piece of information and you give information in return. It must be possible in the end to automate the proces you take.

I'm still using this to improve my service and the feedback helps a lot. When I'm further in the process I will try to post sone results!

It's a great model! It reminds me of what Gary Vaynerchuk used to do back in his Wine Library days. He'd spend hours online engaging with people talking about wine or asking for recommendations without ever dropping a link. Did it help build him up as an authority in the wine field? It sure did, and it appears on the surface that was his key focus, but I bet he was equally using it for powerful market research like you are!

 

[Jon L]

Hey, so I'm trying this out and having some success with it. My business is pretty nerdy (data analysis), so I wasn't sure how to find 'normal people' that would want to interact with me. I found a guy that recently learned how to use Excel pivot tables. I congratulated him. We exchanged a couple tweets, and he ended up retweeting one of mine. I'm going to keep experimenting with this. Thanks for posting the idea.

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[Sven]

Some results I would like to share with you till now:

I searched on Twitter for people looking for suggestions, for example: "What to eat today?" (not actually my focus, cause I want to keep it for myself for now). I replied to these Tweets with something like: "if you give me some ingredients you like, I will give you some suggestions".

I gave them suggestions just based on my own preferences first, but later I got better and gave them suggestions they normally would not think of. I got reactions like "cool!", "loved it, thanks" and "great suggestion". Besides the thank you's it resulted in retweets, favorites, followers and clicks on links.

I sent around 10 suggestions now which cost me little time and resulted in around 1500 views, 27 clicks (not all suggestions had links), 18 followers. Not big numbers but for the effort I put in it's cheaper than ads and learns a lot about the customers. In a few days I'm gonna try it with more tweets and a more automated process.