Verifying An Idea, Before Building

Found A Business Idea

My first job in the online marketing world was at a Web Design company in Tucson called AnchorWave. They created great WordPress sites and then would hand them off to the client.

The problem was that we would then spend hours talking on the phone, answering questions, and training the client on how to use WordPress.

The Idea came to me, what if I created a plugin that had basic training videos to show clients how to do the basics in WordPress. So I came up with WordPress Tours.

Verifying The Idea

I know that this was a problem for our company, but was it for other WordPress design companies? Are there many other WordPress design sites? Rather then spending a lot of time and resources building a product for a market that doesn’t exist I decided to create a survey and ask designers to take the survey.

Questions I Had

How many WordPress websites does a typical design company do per a year?
Do they provide training on how to use WordPress?
If yes, how much time and money are they paying for training?
What questions do they get asked the most by clients?
If they were to pay for a solution what would it have to have?

Survey Stats

30 people surveyed
22 completed & 8 partials

Summary of Survey Results

75% of designers do 5+ WordPress sites a year. 32% of designers do 15+ WordPress sites a year.
90% of designers include training, 70% of the designers are doing the training themselves.
79% of designers spend 1-3 hours training clients at a cost of $100 or less
Got great feedback on what the training would need to include and what questions they get asked frequently.

Lessons Learned

Validate your idea! Is there really an opportunity?
Find the pain points in the data (Most designers do training themselves)
Get their email! I got 9 emails from this survey from designers who wanted to get contacted about the beta version of the product.

Next Steps

I will be starting to build out the product and growing my email list of designers. If you are interested in the WordPress Tours plugin be sure to sign up for email updates.