Who Uses It, Who Chooses It, Who Pays? Test Your Business Idea Before You Build

A practical guide to understanding community needs, finding the right customers, and testing an idea with a small, purposeful experiment.

By Arbab Naseebullah Kasi, Founder and CEO, Feel Worldwide Foundation Inc.

AI-generated illustration of a customer discovery conversation.

A business idea often begins with something deeply human: noticing a problem that should be easier to solve. A young entrepreneur sees local shops struggling with digital tools. A teacher sees adults who want to learn but cannot attend classes during working hours. A community organizer sees useful equipment sitting idle while nearby families cannot afford to buy their own. Each observation deserves attention. The next step is to understand how a useful solution could become something people can access, trust, and sustain.

Before investing in a website, equipment, or a full program, ask three questions: Who will use this? Who will decide whether it is adopted? Who will pay for it? Sometimes one person fills all three roles. In a community enterprise, education service, or business-to-business offer, those roles may belong to different people. Mapping them separately helps expose assumptions that an enthusiastic response can easily hide. Strategyzer's guidance on customer ecosystems similarly distinguishes end users, decision-makers, and economic buyers. Source: Strategyzer.

Consider a fictional example. Amina is a young entrepreneur who wants to teach practical spreadsheet skills to staff at neighborhood shops. Employees say they would welcome help with stock records and daily sales totals. Encouraged by those conversations, she considers renting a classroom and buying several laptops. Yet she has not spoken to the shop owners who would approve staff time or cover the course fee. She has discovered interest in learning, but important questions about the proposed service remain unanswered.

For Amina, an employee might be the user, a shop manager might decide when training can happen, and the owner might control the budget. In a very small shop, the owner may fill all three roles. Each conversation therefore has a different purpose. Employees can explain which tasks are confusing. Managers can describe scheduling and staffing constraints. Owners can explain which improvements would justify spending. A course becomes easier to design when those perspectives are understood together.

There is also a fourth question worth keeping in view: who could be left out? A training time that suits an owner might be difficult for an employee with caring responsibilities. A laptop-based lesson might assume access someone does not have. Ask people what would make participation workable, and offer a convenient way to respond. A service can have a buyer and still fail the people it is meant to help. Understanding access early gives you a chance to design it into the offer.

Start with the problem as people currently experience it. The U.S. Small Business Administration recommends investigating demand, competing options, location, and what customers pay for alternatives, using both existing information and direct research. Applied to Amina's idea, that means finding out whether shops already use notebooks, spreadsheets, software, or help from a relative. An existing workaround matters even when nobody calls it a competing product. It reveals what the new service would have to improve. Source: SBA.

The most useful conversation gives the other person room to explain their experience. Amina could ask, "Can you walk me through the last time you updated your stock records?" She could follow with, "Where did you get stuck?" and "What happened next?" Those questions might reveal that the difficulty is inconsistent product names or missing receipts, rather than a lack of spreadsheet knowledge. IDEO.org's interview guidance encourages listening to people in their own words and paying attention to the context in which they live or work. Ask permission before taking notes or recording, and keep private business information out of any public example. Source: IDEO.org Design Kit.

A conversation with the payer should also be specific. Amina could ask the owner how similar training has been funded before, who approves it, and what would make a short trial worthwhile. She might learn that paying for a large course is difficult, but paying for a brief session at the shop is possible. She might also learn that the owner has no available budget. Both answers are useful. The purpose of research is to uncover the conditions under which an offer could work, including evidence that it needs to change.

Keep encouraging comments separate from evidence you can act on. After each conversation, write down the problem described, the current workaround, the person with authority to decide, and any specific next step they agreed to consider. Record uncertainty too. "Interested in learning more" means something different from "the owner agreed to review a written offer on Friday." Neither is a sale. These notes help you notice patterns without turning politeness into a promise.

For a social enterprise, the person who benefits may be unable to pay the full cost. That does not make the need less valuable. It raises a design question: could an employer purchase the service, could an institution commission it, or could a confirmed subsidy support access? Treat each possibility as a hypothesis to investigate. A potential sponsor belongs in the research notes until an actual commitment exists. If funding would last only for a short pilot, explain what would need to happen for the service to continue afterward.

Once the problem and purchasing process are clearer, make the first offer small enough to learn from. In this fictional example, Amina could propose one session for three shop employees, using a sample inventory file and equipment the shop already has. She would specify the task participants should be able to complete, the session length, the price, and what support is included. Using sample records would let participants practice without exposing real customer or business data. The owner and employees would know exactly what they were considering.

A simple offer can be written in one paragraph. Amina might say, "I propose a 90-minute practice session for three employees, using a sample stock sheet. We will work through entering products, recording a sale, and updating the quantity available. Before booking, we will agree on the fee, equipment, timing, and what support is included. At the end, each participant will try the task independently so we can see what still needs practice." This is a proposed teaching exercise, with an observable task and clear boundaries. It makes no promise about future sales or earnings.

Decide what evidence to collect before delivering the session. Can participants complete the agreed task without assistance afterward? Does the timing work for the shop? How long does preparation and follow-up take? Does the owner choose to purchase another session at the stated price? A completed payment provides stronger evidence of willingness to pay than a compliment, but one purchase still cannot establish lasting demand. Learning results, delivery effort, and repeat interest should be recorded separately so that a positive result in one area does not conceal a problem in another.

Amina should also record the resources needed to deliver the service again. Preparation, travel, teaching, follow-up, internet access, and materials all belong in that picture. If the first session requires more time than expected, she may need to narrow its scope, improve the materials, adjust the price, or reconsider the delivery model. If an introductory discount helped secure the trial, the next test should make the intended ongoing price clear. Otherwise, she could mistake demand for a temporary offer for demand for the service she actually plans to provide.

You can begin this process with a simple exercise over the next week. On the first day, write down one problem, the people experiencing it, and your assumptions about who decides and pays. Over the following days, arrange a small set of conversations across those roles, including people outside your immediate circle. Where someone fills several roles, explore each responsibility. Keep notes on what you heard, what remains uncertain, and what would change your mind. At the end of the week, use those notes to design a modest next test. This is a starting exercise, not a deadline for proving a business can succeed.

If those conversations reveal a workable opportunity, the second week could be used to prepare and run one agreed pilot. Confirm the person responsible for each task, the resources available, and a review date. If permission, equipment, or payment arrangements are unresolved, use the week to resolve them instead. A useful 14-day outcome might be a completed trial, a revised offer, or a well-supported decision to stop. The calendar gives the learning process structure; it does not guarantee that a customer will be ready.

Your next decision may be to continue, change the offer, or pause. Perhaps the problem matters, but the proposed format is inconvenient. Perhaps users are interested, but you have been speaking to someone without purchasing authority. Perhaps another organization already provides an accessible solution, creating an opportunity for collaboration. Discovering these things early helps you choose your next action with greater care. An idea can improve because you listened closely enough to revise it.

For educators and community organizations, this exercise can also become a small teaching activity. Ask each learner to explain whose problem they investigated, whose decision matters, and what evidence changed their thinking. Evaluate the quality of the inquiry and the next decision, rather than rewarding only the most confident presentation. Learners who discover that an idea needs to change have still done valuable work. Their account should make clear what they know, what they assume, and what they intend to test next.

This approach fits the connection between learning, enterprise, and economic participation described in Feel Worldwide Foundation Inc.'s Skills, Work & Entrepreneurship work. Practical entrepreneurship education should help people examine an opportunity, ask informed questions, and make decisions they can explain. For a first-time founder, that progress can begin with a notebook and a conversation. Choose one problem you care about, identify the people involved, and listen carefully enough to discover what a useful next step would be.

Educators, mentors, community organizations, and business owners interested in practical entrepreneurship learning are welcome to connect with Feel Worldwide Foundation Inc. Tell us who you hope to serve, the problem you want to explore, and the support you could contribute. That gives a potential collaboration a useful place to begin.