Stress-testing new product ideas

If you got an idea of a new product or service, follow this logic.

Throw away the thought that you are the first one who came up with this idea. Assume that someone had already tried to launch something similar before and failed. It’s much easier to look for various reasons why the product failed than to predict your own future mistakes.

Now you can create a list of the different hypothesis that you will have to check.  A few simple ones that are worth being mentioned follows.

For some reason, customers did not want to pay for this product.

For some reason, this was not profitable for the seller.

For some reason, they could not attract new customers.

For some reason, distribution did not work.

For some reason, support was difficult to arrange.

This list with all possible mistakes is the list of hypotheses you can now start testing.