You toiled away in your creation cave, only to share your product with the world and not only was it stressful for you, the launch was extremely underwhelming.

Well friend, in this article we want to help you validate your next digital product offer, feel confident you have a group of potential customers waiting for it, and working your way towards running a calm business.

What is a Calm Creator Business?

A Calm Creator Business is one that focuses on three core principles: predictability, profitability, and peacefulness.

The online business space can be rough on our mental health and that's why we advocate for taking a slow and steady approach, as opposed to hustling and working yourself to a place of burnout.

Building calm companies has never been more possible, you simply need to focus on the right things early on.

Predictability means you're in control of your calm creator business

Having good systems, processes, and time management in place will help you build a calm company. It may feel like you're adding structure where you want more flexibility, but with 10+ years of experience, we've learned that structure leads to less stress and a business that doesn't constantly feel like a tornado of to-dos.

Profitability means you can plan out your online business revenue

Having a launch that flops or constantly feeling the pressure of financial stress is often a symptom of a lack of planning and preparation. As a calm creator, the further ahead you can get of your creation, marketing, and sales schedules, the more profitable your calm creator business will become.

Our product launches used to be last minute, frantic, and a hot mess. Nowadays, we launch products to modest audiences with nearly zero stress and can confidently plan our revenue.

Peacefulness means running a calm company with more balance and less overwhelm

We remember when working on our businesses felt like we were stuck in a violent storm in the middle of the ocean.

These days, with a calm business approach, it feels like we're sailing calm waters in the smooth seas of online business.

We have more time to enjoy life, balance out our work hours, and we even took an entire year off to travel (while still generating multiple six fingers in income!)

How to Validate Your Next Product

Validation is an often overlooked and fast-forwarded step in the online business world. Many creators have an idea for a product, start building it, launch it with a few pieces of content, and then wonder why it had lackluster sales (or no sales at all).

We've been there! We know what this feels like and we want to ensure you're operating an online business in a niche market that wants to purchase your product.

Talk to Potential Customers

The fastest way to validate your next service business, software company, online course, digital download, etc, is to get on actual calls with potential customers in your product niche.

We know... this doesn't sound like the most fun task. But, you know what's even less fun? Spending months working on a product that no one buys.

Sustainable business owners know their customers and understand their problems. As a smart calm creator, it's your job to ensure that whatever product you are offering, you're connecting with real human people to find out if your solution is in alignment with their needs.

Survey an Existing Audience

Whether it's a social media audience or an email list, sending a survey to validate your next offer is a great second step (we'd still recommend interviews as the #1 move!)

A good product survey asks the following:

• What demographic are you in? (Ensuring the data comes from the right niche market)

• Does this problem resonate with you? (Ensuring there is alignment)

• Does this solution excite you? (Ensuring user engagement)

• What would you pay to solve this problem? (Gauging price sensitivity)

• Would you get on a call to discuss this further? (A great way to find folks to interview!)

• Would you like first access at a discount when this launches? (Warm customer leads)

When sending a survey, we highly recommend NOT hiding it within another piece of content. Meaning, don't write a 1,000 word email and have one sentence about taking the survey hidden in the middle. Send dedicated emails, create dedicated posts, invest in getting people's attention clearly on your survey.

Don't overcomplicate survey technology either. You can use Google Forms or Tally Forms, both are free survey tools!

Pre-Sell The Idea to Your Audience

Notice we wrote "idea" and not "product." We've used pre-selling successfully for all kinds of lifestyle business products (software companies, courses, e-books, templates, etc). If your product idea speaks to enough of the problem and solution a potential customer is looking for, they will pay for it in advance!

Pre-selling can help you avoid financial stress by generating revenue before you invest too much time building the actual product. We would only recommend pre-selling your product AFTER you've done customer interviews and sent a survey with positive responses.

Create a pre-selling goal that sets a baseline to build

We created a successful online course that taught people how to get sponsorships for various pieces of content (videos, blogs, etc). One question that came up from customers was if we could create a course about sponsorships for podcasts, as podcasting was on the rise.

Instead of just building the course and trying to sell it, we pre-sold the course at a discount and set a baseline goal of 100 sales. If the course didn't sell 100 spots, it wouldn't be validated enough and we'd simply refund all the pre-sale customers and move on to our next idea. We ended up with 120 sales after the 1 week pre-sale to a very modest audience of 1,200 people, and that was perfect validation to then build the product and create a full business around it.

If you're finding that you get almost no user engagement during a pre-sale, that's a sign that you don't have product validation and it's time to go back to the drawing board.

A Calm Creator Business is Right Around the Corner For You

Using the product validation strategies in this article can help software companies, service businesses, course creators, and any other solopreneurs build predictable, profitable, and peaceful calm creator businesses.

Whether you're an online business veteran or you're getting ready to launch your first digital product, validating your offer is the critical first step.