Go From IDEA to BUSINESS in 24 Hours

So 99% of businesses fail and the reason the vast majority of those businesses don't make it is just because there was no demand for their product. There was no product market fit. So with that in mind and something we talk about on this channel all the time is that business and creating your own business and being successful that comes down really to the iterative volume, the number of intelligent times that you can improve that is going to decide whether long run you as an entrepreneur, as a person in business succeed or not. And it may not be your first idea. It may not be your 10th, but it might be the 45th version of your 23rd idea. And that right there could be the one that hits it big. And what nearly everyone does is they spend so much more time on validation, on assessing the product market fit than they need to. We live in a highly globalized and digital world. And for very small amounts of money, you can validate your business idea very, very quickly. And in this video, I'm doing a deep dive into my personal three-part system for validating ideas. Now this video is on behalf of Outside the Box Capital. And today we're looking at Oncolytics, which is a publicly traded company on the NASDAQ exchange under the ticker ONCY. And I want to pause for a moment to tell you about the groundbreaking technology that they're working on. So we all know that cancer is one of the most serious challenges still facing humankind with over one in six deaths globally originating from cancer. And cancer itself physically hides from the immune system, which makes many treatments much less effective and is part of why it's so dangerous to us. Now there's this thing called the RAS pathway that is the hottest thing in cancer treatments right now. And what it does is kind of help certain cells, quote-unquote, activate. And remember, I just said that part of the reason cancer is so difficult to treat is because it's so difficult to detect. And Oncolytics used this approach to develop a RNA cancer treatment. And you may be familiar with RNA. And that treatment is called Pellerirep. And it is non-invasively delivered via IV. Now, the way I like to describe Pellerirep is like aimbot for the immune system. Basically, it helps your body use its existing defenses to target tumors and cancer cells that it wouldn't otherwise even know were there. Now, as a therapy, it works alongside other treatments like chemo and checkpoint inhibitors all across multiple cancer types. And it's showing very promising results in pancreatic, breast and other gastrointestinal cancers. We're talking double to triple the efficacy for some types. And it's the only potential platform combination asset in GI for pharma where there are no competing immunotherapy treatment options. And partly for that reason, it received fast-track designation from the U.S. FDA in pancreatic and breast cancer. Now, the CEO of ONCY, Jared, and his team previously scaled a biotech called Ambrix that they sold to J&J for two billion dollars. And that is the same team now building Oncolytics with a similar market cap to Ambrix before it was sold. Also in an even hotter space with billion-dollar buyout potential. Now, other players in the space like RevMed and C.G. Oncology are respectively valued at eight billion and three billion dollars with only single target efficacy. And so Pelerirep has true platform potential across the sixteen billion dollar gastrointestinal tumor market. And that's ignoring those other markets that we just touched on. So that said, there is tons going on with trial progressions for Pelerirep and an exciting future ahead for the company. So you can learn more at this link and a big congratulations to Jared and the team for what they're building. And that said, let's get back to the video. Now, to make this video a fit for everyone who's watching this, I'm going to have two categories. One is you have an idea, you have some money to put into testing this, and still not a lot at all. We're talking five hundred, maybe a thousand dollars that you're willing to spend to assess the viability and demand for your idea. And on the other side, let's say you are flat broke. You're just starting out. You have zero dollars to put into this, but you still want to figure out if your idea is a good one. So unfortunately, it still is going to require maybe 10 or 20 dollars for the whole system. But good news, you're fine if that is you. And so we have these two groups. The system, the three steps are exactly the same, but I'm going to give you slightly different versions for both of those groups. That said, this is how to validate your idea in 24 hours. Let's go. So the first point I want to make here is that the market's opinion matters above all. You can ignore what all investors say, what all your friends or family or partners say compared to what the market says. If the market says it wants your product or service, you're going to have an awesome business. If everyone else, if all your advisors, your investors, your friends say this is an awesome idea and you deliver that idea to the market and the market doesn't want it, the market was right, not all those other people. So the way to speed run validation is to get your idea out into the real world as quickly as possible. And the reason people don't do this really is all these beliefs and these impediments they apply to themselves about what they are supposed to do and how you go about a business. And again, the world we live in now isn't one where you have to spend 12 months prototyping, six months getting investors, four months getting team members on board, and then go talk to a customer. We live in a world where you can talk to a customer in the next 20 minutes for free or for a very low amount of money. And that is what this system comes down to. It comes down to taking your idea and getting it in front of the market, so to speak, in front of customers nearly immediately and for a very, very low cost. So with that in mind, what this comes down to first is preparation. And so the remainder of the steps are more exciting, but what it starts with is who are you selling to and then how are you communicating your product or service? So the way I think about this is in four parts, as in the whole funnel of a business. You have your product or service, you have your offer, which communicates your product or service, then you have a medium. So a way that you take that offer and you communicate it to a demographic and the demographic is the fourth part. So we have a medium or a channel, we have a demographic, we have an offer and a product or service. And I really want to stress a product or service is not the same as an offer. There are vastly different ways to offer the same product or service. Case in point off the top of my head, water. If I offer you water in a water bottle, that's one product or service. If I offer you water in a water park, that is a very different offer for the same quote unquote product, for the physical water itself. And so how you offer the same underlying thing will drastically impact how the market responds to it. So that's why there's both of these parts. There's the demographic part you need to think about and the offer part. So what I want you to do as step one for this validation piece is don't just pick a single demographic or a single offer, just go a little more wide. We want to throw some spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks. Now, if you have a business where there's only one exact type of person that could use it, right? Maybe that's the case, but probably not. If it is, you do you. If not, pick somewhere between three and five different groups that you think you could sell to who you think would be your perfect customer. Then also pick three to five offers. And this doesn't have to be a massively kind of like each one be a radically different way of presenting the product or service, but you do want some variety in there, a different kind of pricing structure, a different way of phrasing what it is, a different way of pitching the problem or solution that it solves. And Alex Ormosi's book, as much of a trope as it is, I think they're the best resource on this. So his offers book and his money, excuse me, his money models books as well. I'm not affiliated with him, but they are great books for this whole kind of notion of an offer. Okay. So that in mind, again, for this kind of preparation stage, you want to have your demographics listed and you want to have your offers listed. And if you want to think like about that materially, just think of it as an elevator pitch. Your offer is your elevator pitch. What is that, right? So you should have your five different elevator pitch offers written down along with those very specific demographics. Like I want to target sales reps who work at large enterprise companies in the Midwest, or it could be anything as specific as that. With that in mind, the actual step number one in this three-part system is to run ads. Now, this is the one that takes the most amount of money. So step two and step three are equally important. But when I say run ads, what I'm saying is run ads for your idea, contingent upon the fact that the product or service doesn't actually exist. So yes, you heard me right. If you have an idea, you're going to run ads for that idea to try and sell something that doesn't currently exist. Well, is that scamming? If you're selling something that doesn't actually exist? No, do not take any money. Do not actually sell the thing, but there's a few different ways to do this. Number one is create a landing page that says, Hey guys, this is coming out in the future. Do you want to be involved for when it does come out? And then run ads to that page. Number two, and honestly, I prefer number two. And in my opinion, this one is better run ads to a whole funnel. So like, let's say it's an actual, like an e-commerce product, some kind of new physical product creates a simple website for it with a checkout button. And then you're running the ads to the website and just see how many people click checkout after they click checkout. I don't care. Go to a page saying, Hey, actually you were part of a test. Do you want to subscribe for when this comes out in the future? Whatever it looks like, just see if they actually go through all the motions of actually buying it up to the point of them buying it. And that's the case of a product. The same thing applies for a service where your goal is to get people say on sales calls, just set up the whole part of the ad funnel. And you can do this. I'll talk about this in a second, very quickly, very easily, and try and drive traffic into booking sales calls. And the reason that's so impactful is because if you get good traction from those tests, that correlates really strongly with people actually going through and actually buying, actually committing to the purchase. For example, if you set up that checkout funnel, for example, you run some ads to it, you have a $12 cost per lead and the product costs $950, for example. Well, if you can convert more than 3% of this hyper-targeted website traffic, you're going to have a great business. Well, you just validated this in the market, despite the product or service not actually existing. Now, of course, there is no perfect rule here. It's not like if you hit some number, your business is going to be a great success when you actually launch the thing. But this is a data point from the actual market that we can use to judge whether we should continue down the path of actually developing the product or service. Now, the way to actually develop the ad side of this is really easy. Just go to Google Ads is my personal favorite or the MetaSuite, so Facebook and Instagram. Then go to an AI design platform or a photo platform. There are some free ones out there. And just say, hey, this is my exact product. This is what it looks like. Here are the specs. Create Google Ad or Meta Ad images for it. Then you do a little work there. You get all of your creatives. You plug those into, say, Google Ads. And then you can even just plug in a description on Google Ads of your product. And Google Ads will do all of the copy work for you. It'll generate things like the headline and the description. To create a landing page is just as easy. There's tons of website builders out there, a lot of which we've looked at on this channel. Just go create your landing page, and then you have an ad funnel. Now, again, I said this one requires more money than the others, and that's true. But you can get really good results from a test like this by just putting in $300, $400, maybe a few thousand dollars over the course of a few weeks. And you don't even need a few weeks. What you can do, and I recommend this, is just put all your budget and let the campaign run in one single day. The market is big. You're just spending a little amount of money. So you can get the results from this test in a few hours. That's not always the case because for, like, performance max campaigns on Google, you have that learning period and then spending adjusts through that. But for other campaigns, you can do that. So that is step number one. Create ads for your idea. Actually test it in the marketplace. Number two is the same thing, except it is cheaper and it is much more efficient. And trust me, you will get feedback immediately if you do either one of these two things. And that step number two in the system is cold calling. Now, there's a whole spiel, there's a whole hour-long video we could make about this subject specifically, and a lot of people don't just are scared of cold calling. But what cold calling does is it lets you get in front of your actual customers immediately for free and pitch them on your product. Like, think about that. Think about the fact that people so often don't ever talk to a customer before they build something. And what they could literally do in the span of 10 minutes is they could go cold call their customers, actually pitch them the product and see what their response is. Again, your product or service doesn't have to be built out for you to do this, but you can judge their response in advance, adjust the pitch, adjust the product or service, and do all of that before you have to put the money or time into developing the thing. And you can do this one literally for free. So you already have your demographics and your pitches. So the next step is to get leads. Now, if you have a little bit of money, let's say you have $100 that you're willing to spend on leads, you can go to platforms like Apollo, you can pay 20 bucks, 50 bucks a month, and you can get thousands of leads. Now, if you have literally no dollars, you can still sign up to a platform like Apollo, and you'll get some sample leads, like a few hundred just for creating the accounts. And now you have a few hundred leads, which is still a lot. It's not that much, and you definitely want more. And there are some kind of gray area ways of getting lots of leads that I won't go into. But basically, if you want to get leads and you're committed to it, and you don't want to spend any money, you can do that. Now, those leads should match the demographics. So plug those same detailed specifications that you came up with into the lead platforms, and then now you got your leads. Then you need a calling software if, again, you're willing to spend a little bit more money. That's useful for a few reasons. Number one, you can record it, so you can include that then to listen back, to talk to investors. And number two, in terms of just tracking and calling people again, it just does all of that for you instead of you doing it manually. So with 20 or 50 bucks, you could sign up for what's called a dialer like that, like RingCentral is a very cheap one. If you have no money, just use your cell phone. It's a lot more manual. You can use a spreadsheet for tracking, but that still gets the job done. And then just call. Just call, pitch the customers of your product, see how they respond. And if they actually want to buy, number one, awesome, you did it. And number two, now you can say something like, okay, awesome, I'll be honest, this is where I'm at with it and why I called you. Do you want to be or commit to being an early customer? Because then you can use that as social proof to get investors to go convince other clients to go for it. Just use that as leverage. Use it as momentum to drive you forward as you actually develop the real thing. Okay, now number three, finally, is along the same lines as cold calling. That is cold email. The advantage of cold email is that you don't have to sit there calling for the four hours that it takes, even if that's only four hours. You can just set up the infrastructure, you can write the scripts, and you can let it rip. Now, the difference here as well, though, is that you will need more leads. We want 10,000, 50,000 leads instead of the maybe thousand or few thousand leads we would want for cold calling. Now, we've gone over that in a bunch of other videos, so the whole cold email setup and infrastructure, and there's great resources out there on YouTube on that front. What I'll say is you just want to make sure you clearly delineate your tests and you do very clear offer tests. So like we discussed, different demographics, different offers, different subject lines, different sequences. Throw that spaghetti at the wall, see what sticks, and then once it sticks, don't just double or triple down, 10x down, I don't know what the word is for that, 50x down, go all in on that. And now you know that is what is validated. And then you go build the product or service, and then you just rinse and repeat the same exact marketing strategy. And so the whole goal of this system is that after you have validated your idea, by the time you go and build your product or service, not only do you know the demand is there, do you know that you validated it in a sense, but you have an exact marketing channel and a way to go get future clients. If that one of those things, those cold calling ads or cold email worked initially, just scale that up, just linearly scale the inputs, the amount of people calling, the amount of emails you spend, or the budget on paid ads. So that was the video and the system. I hope you find this one useful. That's definitely something I've really found genuinely personally useful in my life. And that said, I'll see you all in the next one. Cheers.