How to Kill or Validate a Business Idea in 30 Minutes

Business ideas are inherently exciting. But there is nothing financially or emotionally worse than getting carried away, sinking months into a project that was doomed to fail from the start.

Just 30 minutes of your time could answer the all-important question: could this really work?

With the help of data, you can take a step back and complete an objective review. After half an hour or less, you’ll have significantly more clarity on numerous key points:

• Is there a real target market?
• Do I have a genuine USP?
• Am I too late to the trend?

So without further ado, let’s validate your business idea.

Or kill it.

Step 1: Validate the Target Market

Many of the best business ideas are born from a personal pain point. But that’s far from failsafe: the mere fact of knowing you would pay for a particular product or service does not guarantee the existence of a wider market.

If you take one thing away from this guide, it should be that data is your friend when validating a business idea. It strips back all of the emotion and subjectivity.

So the first thing to do is to see if anybody else wants what you’re planning to offer. If the answer is no, then your decision is clear: kill the idea.

There are different ways you could go about doing this: you could conduct field research, run your own focus groups, or even create a simple prototype product to help gauge interest.

But all of those things take time and money. And I promised 30 minutes.

Thankfully, the incredibly valuable data that you need is probably already out there. You don’t need to start from scratch, you just need to know where to look.

A simple place to begin is checking search volume. You could use a free tool like Google Trends, but I prefer Exploding Topics, which gives you raw figures instead of a relative “0-100” scale.

After all, if I’m thinking about launching a business, it’s no good knowing that my idea is the most popular that it has ever been. If that only amounts to 60 searches per month, I’m going to struggle to find a market.

Let’s say I’ve been playing a lot of pickleball recently, and I’ve been unable to find adequate socks. Searching “pickleball socks” in the database gives me an immediate overview:

Straight away, I can see that the monthly global search volume is 2.9K. That’s not super-high, but it wouldn’t justify killing the business idea on the spot.

I can also see that there have been clear December search spikes since 2022. From this, I can infer that pickleball socks are growing in popularity as a seasonal gift for people who play the sport, but interest among enthusiasts themselves is progressing more gradually.

Again, this alone may not justify a “kill” verdict. It might prompt a pivot in how I plan to market the product, but it isn’t necessarily terminal.

My next simple step is toggling on the “forecast” option (another advantage of Exploding Topics over Google Trends). Based on millions of data points from online signals and similar search trend patterns, the platform is able to forecast the likely trajectory of the trend over the next 12 months.

This forecast suggests that interest in pickleball socks may have peaked. For a search term which didn’t have the highest volumes in the first place, that’s enough to make the call: kill the idea.

The third option: wait and see

It isn’t always quite as simple as validate or kill.

Having looked at the search volume, you may conclude that the trend you have identified is not yet strong enough to support a new business idea. But there is enough promise to keep an eye on it.

Even with something like the pickleball socks, you might decide that you’d like to keep track of whether or not the forecasted decline plays out as predicted.

In situations like this, it’s important to keep a convenient log of your paused ideas, ideally somewhere that also continues to track changes in search interest.

If you’re using Exploding Topics, you can use Trend Tracking for this. It will continuously monitor the 5-year trend line and monthly search volumes of your on-hold ideas.

After your quick initial search, you can move these ideas completely onto the back burner. Periodically checking in every couple of months or so will show you at a glance whether any paused ideas can be moved up to the next stage of validation (or if they need to be killed for good).

Step 2: Validate the USP

If there’s consumer interest in your business idea, then it has passed the first hurdle. The next step is to check whether you’re offering anything different from what’s already out there.

As a writer, let’s say I’ve identified writer’s block as a possible pain point, and hit upon the idea of an AI writing tool. One look at the trend shows me that this is not a sufficiently unique product idea.

Growth is exploding. But the market is already well on its way to maturity, with over 200K searches per month: to stand any chance with a general-purpose AI writing agent, I would have needed to set out before April 2025 (66.3K monthly searches), when interest began to rise steeply. Ideally, I would have been marketing the product pre-2023.

The verdict on this business idea in its current form is clear: kill.

However, I can look at related trends to see if there are any longer-tail searches that might yield a convincing USP.

Google Trends is good for this: when you look up a topic, it breaks down a list of related top queries and rising queries (albeit still without raw search numbers). Alternatively, the functionality is built into Exploding Topics, so you’ll see related trends under every search chart.

Here’s what it looks like for AI writing tools:

This shows that tools for students, academics and authors have all shown some upward momentum, at far lower raw search volumes (you can check these by clicking into the individual trend). Catering to one of these markets could therefore have the hallmarks of a business idea with a USP.

But in order to know that for sure, you need to do a bit of competitor analysis. That might sound daunting, but don’t worry: you’ll still have the whole process wrapped up in 30 minutes.

At this stage in your research, the simplest method is often just a Google search. I typed in “AI academic writing tools”, and found out within seconds that there are already multiple players within the space.

From here, you could decide that the niche is already too congested. Or you could skim competitors’ sites for any obvious gaps or areas for improvement.

Incidentally, the Reddit result that featured high up my search could prove to be a very useful resource. It will be full of genuine users talking about what is and isn’t working for them.

It’s also worth returning to a trend tracking platform to see how these newly-discovered competitors are faring. You don’t want to take inspiration from a business idea that isn’t working.

In this case, Paperpal is clearly achieving excellent growth.

Nevertheless, if you can’t find a genuine way of organically standing out, it’s time to kill the business idea. Otherwise, it’s onto the final stage.

Step 3: Validate the Growth Potential (+ Final Checks)

If you have a target market and a USP, you’re a good chunk of the way there. But you still need to see if there is genuine room for growth before you have a fully validated business idea.

If you checked the 1-year trend forecast at step 1, you’ve already taken a big step. Of course, it’s only predictive, but steep expected growth over the next 12 months is a very positive sign.

I’m about to become a father for the first time, and I’m thinking about what I’ll need for the baby. Let’s say I’m conscious about protecting their eyes and ears from splashes during bath time; a quick look at the trend forecast highlights this as a potentially high-growth idea.

But even with a chart like this, you’ll still want to carry out some final checks. For that, you need to look at some secondary signals outside of traditional search growth.

In the vast majority of cases, you won’t be selling a product that nobody has ever sold before. Naturally, you’ll want to take steps to stand out, but there will be useful points of comparison already on the market. It’s worth checking how consumer search interest is currently translating into hard sales.

If I click on “product details” within Exploding Topics, I can see average sales data from Amazon. Using the baby shower caps example, top sellers are averaging a little over $8,000 per month.

I’m also going to check how baby shower caps are performing across various social channels. If you can, it’s good to find a trend tracking tool that picks up growth signals from multiple platforms.

In this case, I can see that interest is especially high across Pinterest, Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook.

You may want to do a quick search for your product on the platform(s) where it is gaining the most traction. This will only take a matter of minutes, but you’ll get more of an idea about how people are talking about the product, and where your messaging could fit in.

For TikTok specifically, you can use the TikTok Insights tool. You’ll be able to view the top-performing videos directly, as well as accessing metrics on total posts, views, and likes.

When thinking about growth potential, it’s also sensible to check if there’s room for expansion from your initial idea. There are plenty of successful niche businesses, but ideally you’ll have a roadmap beyond a single product.

For this, you’ll want to consider which “meta trends” your business idea fits into.

Returning to the shower cap idea, “baby on board” is a massive meta trend. So if you manage to find initial traction, there are all kinds of areas into which you could grow.

So in theory, you’ve got a clear progression:

Launch baby shower caps brand → Grow brand awareness on channels like TikTok, Instagram, and Pinterest → Capitalize as product interest continues to grow → Branch out into related baby products once consumers trust your brand

Starting a business is still really hard, and validating the idea is only the first step. But in 30 minutes, you’ve been able to efficiently kill any non-starters, and clarify the ones that stand a real chance of success.

Finding Your Next Great Business Idea

That’s it! You’re done. And there’s probably enough time left in that 30 minutes for you to start brainstorming your next great business idea.

I would argue that this is where Exploding Topics stands out even more. Unlike lots of trend tracking alternatives, it is a platform for inspiration and discovery as well as targeted trend validation.

You can browse it in a way that simply wouldn’t be possible with something like Google Trends. So rather than thinking of an idea and then going through all of the steps to check it, you can effectively scroll through a curated database of potentially viable jumping-off points within the niche of your choosing.

You can filter by timeframe, growth, and volatility to really hone in on early-stage, high-velocity trends. So instead of relying on personal flashes of inspiration, and hoping you’ve hit upon market fit, you can start multiple stages ahead of your competitors.

And when that spark does come to you, you’ll have the data you need to validate or kill it without wasting time and money.

Sign up for a free trial of Exploding Topics today to start validating business ideas without all the fuss.