Validate Your Idea
Pursue your idea with confidence
Find out whether there’s a business here before you spend money finding out the hard way.
Every idea sounds good in your head
Is anyone actually going to buy this?
LivePlan's Idea Canvas scores your assumptions against real research from forums, reviews, and customer discussions, so the weak ones surface before you act on them.
Are there enough of them to make a business?
Embedded market research gives you the size of your market, who’s in it, and what they’re paying now, with every number sourced.
Will it make any money?
A forecast turns your idea into revenue, costs, and a break-even point, so you find out whether the math works at all.
Validate your idea before you spend time and money on it
Step One: Plan
Outline your idea
Before you can tell whether an idea is any good, you have to get it out of your head. You'll document the problem you’re solving, who has it, who else is solving it, how you’d make money, and what you’d charge. You end up with your assumptions written down in one place, which is the only way to find out later which ones were wrong.
How LivePlan helps
Follow the guided questions in the Idea Canvas to validate your idea. Understand your customer with Market Research and Industry Data.
Step Two: Forecast
Put numbers on it
An idea becomes a business the moment you can say what it costs and what it earns. Work out what you’d charge, what each sale costs you, and what you’d spend to keep the doors open. You’ll get a break-even point and a number for what it takes to start, which is usually the moment an idea either gets real or gets rethought.
How LivePlan helps
You don’t need a finance background. Describe the business to Help Me Forecast and it handles the accounting logic, or enter the numbers yourself. See how forecasting works
Step Three: Review
Check it against reality
Now go and find out whether you’re right. Talk to people who’d actually buy it and record what they say. Look at what competitors charge and how people in your category decide. Then hold all of that up against the assumptions you wrote down in step one and see which ones survive.
- Does what you heard match what you assumed?
- Did anything surprise you?
- What do you still not know?
42% of startups fail because there was no market need for what they built.
How LivePlan helps
Market research gives you market size, competitor pricing, customer demographics, and buying behavior, with every data point cited so you can check it. See what market research covers
Step Four: Refine
Change it while changing it is cheap
Update the canvas with what you learned. Most ideas need adjusting before they’re worth launching, and the adjustment is almost always to one of three things: who you’re selling to, what you’re selling, or how you make money on it. If the idea holds up, you’ve got the start of a plan and a forecast. If it doesn’t, you found out now rather than after the lease was signed.
- Your target customer
- Your business model
- How you sell it
How LivePlan helps
Your canvas, your research, and your numbers all live in the same place, so changing one assumption updates what depends on it rather than leaving you to remember. When you’re ready, the plan and the full forecast build from what you’ve already done.