How to test a business idea before you spend anything on it

The business clinic is an open hour. Anyone can take the microphone and put their idea to Aziz Musa, and in this one a dental student, a researcher, two women starting product businesses, a trader and an engineer all did. The ideas had nothing in common. The answer did, and it amounts to a method for how to test a business idea: put something in public that a stranger can react to, before you spend money you cannot get back.

He is not talking about market research. He means the smallest real thing you can put out this week, one free client, one recorded episode, one video of five products, and the fact that what comes back is data. Everyone who spoke was told to return the following month and show what they had done.

Ahmed is in his fourth year of dentistry in Jeddah, and one of his ideas is advertising inside rental cars, with the revenue split between the rental company and him. Aziz likes it and says why. He rents a car in Saudi Arabia every couple of months and has never seen an advert in one; he has seen screens in the back of taxis in the UAE. And the fleet sorts itself into tiers, so the luxury brands go in the Land Cruisers and the cheaper advertisers in the mid range cars.

Then the instruction, and it is entirely concrete. There is a long street coming from Jeddah airport with something like 30 rental companies on it. Go to one. Say you are starting, you have no track record, you want a trial. Charge the advertisers nothing for the first month and agree with the rental company that you take nothing for the first three. When one company is running you have a model, and the model is the expensive part, because it goes to every other company on that street. The first five will say no, and he is losing nothing except his time.

Ahmed says he wants to gather capable people around him first. Aziz turns it around. If you want to go far, go with people; if you want to go fast, go alone. Start alone. The people come afterwards.

Build your name before you sell.

Ruqaya is in the UAE and wants to prepare rooms for new mothers: the bed, the chairs, the curtains, simple wall decor, the newborn tray, the baking. His first question is whether she has done it for herself, and she has, on her family's house in Sudan, where people assumed she was the engineer. His pricing rule is short: start expensive, because coming down is easy and going up is close to impossible. The customer is not vague either, she is a woman due in six months who already buys at that level.

On the name he is relaxed. Use your own or your husband's, as she did with an earlier bun business named from their initials. What he will not let her postpone is the evidence. Open the accounts and show the work before you register anything, and do not only post photographs, because a billion people post photographs. Get in front of the camera and tell the story of each project. If she will not show her face, photographs with her voice over them work, because what persuades people is that it comes from someone who did it.

Hajir asks the same thing from the other end. She wants a skincare brand built on one raw ingredient in a crowded market, and has spent two months stuck on the name. Choose one by tomorrow, he says: X was Twitter and before that Odeo. It has to be pronounceable in Sudanese and in English because she is selling to both, and after that it does not matter, because she is the brand. Her content starts from the science behind the ingredient, which is also how she finds out whether the claim she is building on holds.

Suad is in Egypt. Her real interest is product formulation, but the business she started was shipping bed linen into Sudan. She could not reach buyers beyond her own relatives, posted into local Facebook groups and got a thin response, and found that on a basic item people take the cheaper one regardless of quality, while on a full set with a cover they pay whatever it costs. Then textiles were restricted at import and most of her capital is sitting there.

Aziz names the first part, price elasticity, then gives her two things to know before she buys anything else: what the market actually wants, and what the duties and restrictions are. The mechanism is the useful bit. People in Sudan are prepared to wait, so take the orders first, then buy the goods, then ship. The delay works for you, because you never carry stock you paid for.

And the free test, the same shape as everything else in the hour. Pick five products you have a feeling might sell. Make a video out of the photographs you already have. Ask people which ones they want and what they would pay. Now you have real numbers, 12 people for one product and 5 for another, and you know where the money goes. He also points her at Hajir, since one can formulate and the other is building a brand.

Dr Rasha is a researcher who wants a weekly 30 minute podcast in Arabic explaining trending papers, the way the American Society for Microbiology does it in English. Aziz gives her the whole ladder. Free: record on your phone or laptop, use Zoom or Google Meet when you need to show diagrams, publish on Facebook, Instagram and X. Twelve dollars a month: Castos, which hosts it and pushes it to Spotify, Apple and Amazon. Thirty dollars: Riverside, which records, brings in a guest and produces the subtitles and transcript.

Then he sets all of it aside. None of that is the problem. The problem is episode one. In six months she will be embarrassed by it, he is embarrassed by his own first episodes and they are still up, and nobody is manufactured to present a podcast. In a field as narrow as hers, the people who want to argue with her already exist.

Babiker is the other end of the same point. He is a sales engineer in refrigeration and air conditioning in America, working through his licences, one done and the second by the end of 2026. Aziz takes the six months that will take and gives them a job: publish what you already know, on the channel your customers are on rather than the one where marketers talk to each other, so that you are known before you open. Two hundred thousand dollars of revenue in America is a reasonable target, and even if the profit is small, the name is what you are buying.