From Idea to Validation: A Blueprint for Physician Startups

2023-11-25 | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ekIfDqFdEo Transcript YouTube English auto-captions. so you've got a great idea for a business but you're not sure if it's going to fly should you be devoting your precious hours to this project is it going to work is it going to make you money is it going to become successful well those are questions every entrepreneur goes through and today I want to cover some strategies so you can validate your online business idea so whether you're always dreaming of ideas and writing it down on a napkin or a pad of paper by your bedside before you go to bed or perhaps you have already gone past that and you've already assembled a team and you're ready to approach investors at the end of the day there's kind of fundamental steps you need to have to identify and validate your business model so if you're ready to dive in let's talk about validating business ideas on this episode of bootstrap [Music] MD hey guys this is Dr Mika mang welcome to another edition of bootstrap MD this is the podcast for healthcare and physician entrepreneurs and so a common question that I get as a business coach and mentoring entrepreneurs most notably physician entrepreneurs is how do you come up with a business idea that you think is going to work that it's going to become successful there's one thing about coming up with ideas but then you need to validate it to make sure that quote society that the universe is going to be wanting those ideas and one issue that I often see is we come up with some great ideas but they don't do enough to determine is this something that people are going to pay for you may think it might be the best idea in slice bread but if nobody else wants sliced bread then you're going to have a problem so we're going to talk about kind of a process that I go through and I help Mentor other uh clients uh to go through when coming up with ideas and then making sure that idea is going to become a success and obviously you can't predict the future but there are some things that you can to minimize your risk we know that often times you're you're busy working you're paying bills and you don't have a lot of spare time and you're not sure if this idea is going to fly or night so let's kind of go over kind of my methodology for coming up with and validating business ideas so the first step is identifying issues or problems that you currently face now we'll tailor this to as a physician so what are some areas that you see in your line of work that maybe some areas of frustration maybe you feel that they're needed resources or some type of business that could help you based upon your your own work this could form the basis of an online business for you so you want to make a list of daily frustrations limitations um additional paperwork requirements any other pain points that you currently experience in your own Medical Practice you know is it dealing with insurance providers is it inadequate patient educational resources still not sure on on your idea talk to colleagues discover what their problems are what are their hers that they commonly en encounter put together like a wish list of resources Solutions tools that could help make your job easier see what are the process at work that are you feel are inefficient maybe they're outdated uh and you found way solutions that could improve them maybe you can help with additional appointment booking refill requests discharge planning what are some gaps in physician education on topics such as leadership skills business skills work life uh integration reflect on like what you've done previously in previous lines of work um what are some areas that you feel like you know I often found is I became a source when I found out people were asking me for specific advice such as starting up their own uh practice so you'll probably get a whole bunch of different ideas and let's say you've you you found out that you know what people come up to me to help solve their problems maybe I can take turn this into a business so for the point of this exercise let's say you're really good at building you you build you get what you the work that you put in you you feel that you you you get the the revenue that you're worth you do it so efficiently and ethically and you feel this is something that maybe I can teach maybe as a consultant or as a online course that can be the source of starting a business for you the next strategy is now you've got your idea now let's we got to do some market research it's a great thing about the internet you can just do this right now on your laptop or your desktop you know are other people searching for information or Solutions in this area you can use keyword research tools to get some data back so what am I talking about here well here's a specific method that you can use we all use Google they have what's known as the Google Keyword Planner just put that into Google Google Keyword Planner it's a free planning tool you may have to start up you know start an ad account to get access to it but what it'll do is you'll show you it'll show you potential Search terms that you could do related to your business so this can help to determine if there's a lot of people interested in this so if you're looking up let's say you want to be an expert look up medical billing businesses medical billing experts um find out Andy to determine what keyword phrases would be is if someone was looking for an answer for that our people searches for it if you're not getting a lot you know don't despair maybe it's the keyword that you're using but if you're finding that not a lot of people are actually searching for that particular keyword phrase that probably is a good idea maybe this isn't the time to start that business another way that you can use Google you can do Google Trends so you can search with Google and Google Trends helps identify terms you know over time and then you can you can also compare like search volumes in particular regions of the country and to see perhaps in your country maybe a lot of people are searching for that um you can use tools like fcm rush or spyfu these are competitive analysis tools so you can explore different Search terms that are driving you traffic to competitor websites again you can do Facebook groups LinkedIn groups forums see if there are posts that are that are talking about the problems that you feel that your business could solve you can look up YouTube are there topics that cover cover this if you have a list or perhaps you have a list of colleagues that you can you can do you can do online surveys you can use Google forms or Survey Monkey or whatever survey uh tool that you're using on social um to to ask you know perhaps particular groups is this a problem that that that uh you feel that needs to be solved once you do your market research this will give you a good idea to to determine if there is the demand for this uh product and that'll let you to determine if you should be able to take the next step now taking that so what is the next step I want to kind of focus on when we discussed which is doing a survey uh you do surveys and then just ask you know let's say you belong on to a society in your specialty and let's say we're going to use our example of being the billing expert ask them how big a problem is this to them if they if you can put together a survey of probably like 5 to 10 questions maybe a mix of some multiple choice and some open uh ended questions you're going to get a good idea to determine if this is something that um they would want to have like uh you know one way that you could do it on a scale of 1 to five how important is billing in your practice or how important is is getting paid what you build in your practice if you're seeing a lot of ones or twos they're not interested probably not a great idea if you're saying a lot of fives that's something like this is hot I need to pursue this even even further then an important question you want to ask is would they be willing to pay for it if you were you have a course that can help you to become more efficient how much would that course be worth perhaps it's a building software that you've developed um you know how much would they pay monthly to it so you want to have a good idea and and not a lot of people do this but I think it's really important is you have to understand is are people willing to pay for this particular problem you want to move for just like hey yeah I might be interested in it to determine is this something that could have commercial viability where you're going to be testing like you know are people going to price this what type of price testing use those important met metcs to determine again if you should take the next step as a doctor I wasn't used to asking for help especially when it came to subjects outside of medicine but then I found physician coaches.com in an instant I found hundreds of experts to help me in all aspects of Life on areas I was afraid to ask dealing with burnout starting a side gig money management even help with my marriage and the best part nearly all experts are Physicians themselves after reading their profile and a quick chat I knew I found the right Mentor for me at physician coaches.com help from professional colleagues is just a click away so what's the next step is assessing your competition and again use the power of the internet you can search online to see if there already businesses that are working to solve the issues that you already identified and determine is there a room for another entrance into this field or perhaps you're going to be doing something unique I talk a lot about how what is your USP your unique selling proposition what do you have that makes you unique uh different than from the competition is it better pricing is it being more effective is it um better customer support whatever that is you should identify First what is the competition so how do you determine the competition simply put in those Google phrases that we talked about you know what is coming up in our case uh we were going to look up you know how to become a better medical biller medical billing software how to improve the medical billing process in those examples what do you see you're probably going to see a lot of software on there how much are they pricing the software you know how long have they been been in business are these are are there software out there that been in business for several years that it might be difficult for you to get in or maybe that's even a better place maybe they're considered a dinosaur and they say your company being becoming more effective what are the pricing models can you undercut their pricing on on in there what specific pain points are the competitors addressing and are they doing it effectively is there a big enough audience for you to come in another way that you can assess your competition is to perform a SWAT analysis we've talked about this before s SWOT which stands for strength weaknesses opportunity and threats to determine if this is a time for you to enter this particular market and what will it take so it's important that you kind of look look over the landscape see who your competitor competitors are and then form the basis of what you want to be able to do next to determine if this idea is going to be viable for you or not okay so we talked about coming up with ideas we talked about doing some competitive research to validate your ideas The Next Step step is is all about now you need to start building your perspective audience I recommend using social media it's free to start the the process going building up your audience that way and you need to start developing a webc case to Showcase your expertise and what you're going to be doing is you're going to be giving them showing you hey I'm we're the expert whether it's a business uh we've got some a a product or software that we feel is going to be really important for you to use or perhaps it's just your own expertise you're going to be showing you the your prospective audience that you have the solutions to the particular problems that they're currently having so how do we use social media you're going to identify First what are the platforms you're going to use you want to see like where is your audience is your audience on LinkedIn it's more of a business type or is it more of a Facebook maybe it's a younger audence maybe you're going to be going through like uh Tik Tok or Instagram maybe you have a visual maybe your product is very visual where Instagram is going to be important you want to start then posting let's say now you've identified the social media platforms you want to start posting relevant content relevant free relevant information to show you've got the insights of this particular problem so you're going to be blogging you're going to be posting on the social media and with the idea that you're going to start getting some interest on particular products so again let's let's look at this example if you're going to become the billing expert maybe you're going to start posting about like hey here is a here are seven things you need to know to make your your process your building process more e efficiently maybe you're going to focus on like problems where people are are are businesses medical practices are leaving money on the table because they weren't able to um Bill effectively maybe you're going to show some what not to do where perhaps business has got in trouble because they overbuild so these are all examples that by posting you're going to start building an audience and they going to show that you are uh the expert maybe you'll also generate other areas de develop tips perhaps do live streaming Q&A webinars comment on current news that are related to this particular problem start promoting other colleagues uh content that is relevant to to them so then you're going to start building On Their audience as well so the goal is is establish yourself that you're the expert you're providing Great Value you're going to be very helpful you don't want to be too overly promotional because you know people get carried people can get carried away from that again just post content that shows that you're knowledgeable and that you're helpful now that you've been very helpful and giv great content free content that's showing its a value now it's the time to check to see if they're going to be you're going to gauge to see if you could do a paid offering potential paid offering to this so you got your social media you're building a platform perhaps you're bu building an email list and you're you're going to say hey I've been giving a lot of great information but you know just like you I very limited time um would anybody be interested in doing some Consulting if so I'm going to have a webinar to ask what that is actually going to be about and then what you're going to be doing is you're to be launching that particular product or or or course or whatever you're going to be doing and so you're simply just start a webinar where you can answer q&as and for people who want to know more information you're going to set up a call with potential uh clients that's one way that you can do it you can also do like surveys and kind of follow what we talked about previously about determining different pricing if I came up with a product would that be something that you'd be willing to pay for um you know how big a problem is this for you now if it's a problem that they need to do they need to take care of right now that's something that's hot and you need to jump on that if it's something like yeah I think it's a good idea but maybe 6 months down the road that's probably tells you that maybe you shouldn't pursue this idea you want to gauge some interest you want to also kind of build it up you know with a launch uh I recommend uh getting the book by Jeff Walker a good friend of mine called launch talk about how to launch a particular product you want to get some excitement involved into that but this is where you know I know some doctors get a little bit antsy because yeah I don't want to get paid but you want to be paid what you're worth you develop this expertise over time and so you should be paid what what's the cost of what you've actually had to learn the hard way about this I'm sure you paid uh at least in this case you know with a lot of your time and money to kind of see what's worked and now you'll be able to share it with others and then the final step is now you need to develop your MVP your minimum viable product perhaps you're going to start like a pilot program let's say let's say we're going to start off with um doing some Consulting perhaps it's a one-on-one consulting or perhaps a small group consulting maybe you take them on for like 60 to n days to see if that works you want to identify with that mvp the minimum viable product you know identify like what is the core functionality just like what is the essence I see too many people they try to think of all the different things that they could do when all they need to care about is the MVP if you're not familiar with that term it's very important in tech companies they just want to get something that's functional you know you know run a pilot offer a cohort offer and before you you you do the big launch to to um you know to the masses on here maybe you're going to price it a little bit um a little bit more inexpensively and you're just going to focus on I'm going to make my clients and help them best as I can before I move on forward now what's going to be an important part when you've got that small Cort is feedback you want know like what worked what did you like about it what you didn't like about it that's going to be key to determining you know what is the next step before you make it bigger and and better you know I always like to to have like a small group first to see what works and what doesn't before I come up with some big course where you're spending hours upon hours days after days creating this course I see this all the time they spend all this time creating this course and they launch it and they get crickets because they didn't ask the right questions they didn't cover the right topics that people were interested in by creating a smaller cohort you're going to become more efficient with your time because like I said you're probably busy working as a clinician you don't have a lot of time by by concentrating on the MVP keeping it small getting great feedback you're going to come up with a better product a better service so that was my step-by-step process of coming up and validating your business idea so number one you want to identify issues and problems that you're currently experiencing with to conduct market research around those issues see if other doctors kind of feel like the same using some key keyword research checking in the internet you want to then validate your demand for a potential offering again creating some surveys interviewing your colleagues to see if they' be interested in a particular product or service four you want to assess the competition what else is out there determine what the different pricing is out there is there room for a new player into this industry number five start building your audience through social media creating your own webc case website that showcases your expertise then you want to gauge interests with a paid offering perhaps do a webinar do some Q&A see if this is something that they would pay for very important and then finally developing your MVP your minimum viable product see what's been working getting continuous feedback before you launch your big product or service so I hope you enjoy the topic today coming up with invalidating your business IDE idea it's a question that I get a lot I asked a lot about uh and that process really has been working for me and my students and if you like the podcast and you want to let other people know about it I could really appreciate uh leaving a review on wherever you listen to reviews whether it be on Apple or uh wherever Spotify wherever that is by leaving a five story review that lets other people know about the content that I've been creating helps kind of spread the the message and helps spur more physician entrepreneurs because I really feel that is the only solution to help improve this industry of Medicine by having more Physicians interested in business coming up Solutions which can help humankind so that's it for me as always guys you're going to have ups and downs in your business but do something a little each day get you closer to your