How to validate a business idea before you spend any money.

The five questions, in order.

Take your idea, and answer all five before you spend a penny. If you cannot answer them honestly, that is itself the answer.

1. Who, exactly, is the customer?

"People who like coffee" is not a customer. "People in Sandwich who walk their dog past the Quay before 8am and need a takeaway flat white in under three minutes" is. The more specific your customer, the more obvious your offer becomes. If you cannot point at a real person who would buy this, the idea is too vague to test.

2. What do they currently do instead?

Every customer already has a way of solving the problem you want to solve. They make do, they live without, they pay too much somewhere else, or they put up with it. If you do not know what they do today, you cannot know whether your thing is enough better to be worth switching to.

3. What would they actually pay?

Not what you would charge. What they would pay. The fastest way to find out is to ask 10 of them, with the price written in front of you, and watch their faces. If they all hesitate, your price or your offer is wrong. Better to find that out now than after the website is built.

4. How will they find out about it?

"Social media" is not a channel. Word of mouth from a specific group, a specific Facebook group, a specific market, a specific street, a specific Google search, that is a channel. If you cannot describe how the first 100 customers will hear of you, you are hoping, not planning.

5. What is the smallest version that proves it?

Not the version you want to launch. The smallest version that gives you a real-world yes or no. Sometimes that is a one-page website with a payment link. Sometimes it is a friend's spare market stall on a Saturday. Sometimes it is a sign in a pub.

The one-week test.

Once you have answered the five questions, here is the test:

1. Day 1: write a single page (Notion, a Google Doc, a one-page website) that describes the offer in plain English, with a price, and a way to say yes
2. Day 2: send it to 10 people who match your "exactly the customer" answer. Ask them to either pay, or to tell you what stops them
3. Days 3 to 5: have honest conversations with the ones who said no. Listen, do not argue
4. Day 6: rewrite the offer based on what you heard
5. Day 7: send the new version to 10 different people. Compare the response

You now know more about whether your idea has legs than you would have learned in three months of building.

What to do if it is a no.

Most ideas come back as a soft no on the first test. That is not failure, that is the test working. The question is whether the no was about the offer (fixable) or about the underlying need (not fixable). The conversations on days 3 to 5 are where you find out which.

What to do if it is a yes.

Now you build. But you build the smallest version, the one that lets you take real money from real people. You do not build the version you imagine the business will be in two years. Most of the time, the version you imagine is wrong anyway.