This is how you validate any idea...
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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
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 ONEI’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:
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:
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 👇
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 TWOWe’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
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:
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, My best tweet of the week:
My favorite tweet of the week:
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Sunday Doughnuts By Kevin Bell
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