This is how you validate any idea...



2.25 min Read

There’s a way to validate any market or any business before jumping into it and I’m testing this out.

People have done it before.

This isn’t my idea, but it’s too good not to share.

By figuring this out, you can pretty much determine whatever you need to for your business

  1. If it’s a good market to enter
  2. If the product is needed
  3. Where there’s a hole in the market
  4. What the hole is
  5. Software that companies use
  6. Reverse engineering websites
  7. What competitors are doing well

The list goes on.

The data is out there, it’s just a matter of knowing how to find it and then how to use it.

Scenario ONE

I’m looking to start a cleaning service in the same city that we have a trusted staff member. That’s really the key to a successful cleaning; trusted staff.

This Podcast goes deeper, but the bottom line is a cleaning company is essentially a staffing agency. Your product is your staff. Having quality staff MAKES the business

With that, we have the staff, but need to determine if the market is both viable and what we can add to it… if anything.

So here what I’m doing:

  1. Having a virtual assistant scrape data of the names, numbers, emails and yelp reviews of the cleaning services in the city we plan to enter.
  2. Aggregate the reviews from best to worst and determine what’s going well and what the common faults are for the companies in that area
  3. Use that data to build with those common issues in mind.

This was my post about this task:

“Can you gather a list of both residential and commercial cleaning companies and their yelp reviews. Company names, emails, phone numbers and yelp reviews. I’d also like the list of reviews aggregated to determine what the common faults are.”

This all stems from the ability to scrape.

There’s ways to do this yourself with tools like Outscraper and BuiltWith… but I’m not a scraping expert. I much rather have an expert do their thing and then I can use the data as I need.

If you DO want to try this yourself, check out this video here. Chris breaks it down REALLY well.

The next steps here would be to look further in the market and try to answer these questions:

  1. How many Airbnb’s are in the area?
  2. How many cleaning services are focused on Airbnb?
  3. What’s the population size compared to the number of cleaning services?
  4. Is the market too saturated?
  5. How many residential vs. commercial cleaning companies?

The more we know, the more we’ll be able to prove one way or the other whether this is a good idea.

So what would prove that to me? What would make me want to do this?

These things 👇

  1. Common faults / bad reviews that we can solve
  2. Undersaturated market
  3. A good amount of Airbnbs
  4. A need for residential and/or commercial cleaners

Knowing all of this just takes the guessing out of it.

We can have good ideas all day, but until you know the data, that’s all that it is; an idea.


Scenario TWO

We’re looking to partner with a lawn care company to help grow it and eventually acquire other smaller lawn care services and roll them up.

But first we want to optimize the primary company.

To do that we plan to add additional services such as

  1. Stump grinding
  2. Fertilizer / weed control
  3. Irrigation

To start this, we want to first find out of other companies in the area are subcontracting that work out, and then connect with them to take over that work as the “sub”.

So how do we do that?

Data scraping.

Here was my job request for this:

“Can you create a list of the tree trimming, lawn care and landscaping companies. Name, owner name, email and phone number."

Here’s why I am asking for this and what it will help me do:

The companies in my search are all companies that need those services and either do them in-house or sub it out.

Once I know the companies and have good contact info for them, I can conduct outreach to see if they sub it out. If they do, WE can take that work.

We'll build a team in-house and become a subcontractor for other companies that need the work done.


I've already covered lot and we haven’t even talked about cold outreach.

I’ll go into that more in another email, but here’s the SUPER high level step by step:

  1. Create email
  2. Warm up email
  3. Choose an automation software
  4. Upload list
  5. Build sequence
  6. Send it out

Hope all this helps!


If you have an idea that you want to validate through scraping and examining the data, i'd be happy to talk it out with you to figure out the best approach.


Until next time...

Stay in the fight,

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