How I Validated a Business Idea with under 50 Bucks

My curiosity on a Google search result prompted me to test out an idea with a 50-dollar budget

How it began

Out of curiosity, I googled “books about Vietnam” (in English) and was (un)surprised to see that almost all search results are about the Vietnam War. In addition, most of them were written by authors from the West.

This got me thinking. There is so much more about Vietnam than the Vietnam War, which ended more than 40 years ago. There are plenty of literary works depicting different aspects of Vietnam written by Vietnamese authors.

For example, Kaleidoscope by Nguyen Nhat Anh is a comedic serial novel about the student life of three Vietnamese teenagers.

The problem is they are written in Vietnamese for a Vietnamese audience, with very few works made available in other languages for an international audience.

This is most likely not unique to Vietnam. I do not think I have come across a “P.S. I love you” equivalent in a Thai or Laotian setting, available in English. Maybe such works do not even exist locally. And that will be a question to tackle if I want to look at a regional scale.

At this stage, I narrow it down to the country I am more familiar with Vietnam.

The Gist of the Idea

1. Assume there are people in other countries who would be interested in reading Vietnam’s books if they are available in their languages, e.g. English
2. Let’s say there is a publishing service that curates literary works in Vietnamese, gets them translated to English, and makes them available for purchase in overseas markets.
3. This service is a bridge for 3 key groups of users: authors, translators, and readers. Authors create content in Vietnamese. Translators are responsible for translating the content into other languages. Readers (in this case, overseas) are the ones purchasing and consuming the content.

Analysis of Users’ Needs

From my research, for an author to get his/her books published overseas, one has to navigate the complicated publishing laws in different countries and negotiate publishing contracts with overseas publishers. If there is a service that can bring their works to a bigger market, they will likely be interested.

Similarly, for translators who are getting an average of USD 870 for a 100,000-word book, which is peanuts compared to the translation efforts required, a more competitive compensation framework such as revenue sharing will be attractive.

While that still requires further validation, the weakest assumption lies in the overseas readers’ demand for Vietnam’s books. If there is a demand, the rest will fall in places.

Demand Validation Experiments

The assumption is there are English-speaking readers outside of Vietnam who are interested in English-translated books from Vietnam.

I validated this assumption by running Facebook advertisements. I won’t bore you with the details of how to create Facebook Ads. Essentially, I created a Facebook Page called Heylo Collections with a logo I “designed” using a Canva template.

Experiment 1&2: Discover Vietnam’s stories through the voice of Vietnamese authors

I ran an ad that introduced the idea of discovering Vietnam’s stories through the voice of Vietnamese authors for one week with a 10-dollar budget.

The advertisement is optimised for lead generation. If users click on the “Learn More” button, they will see a waitlist form where they will able to leave an email address for me to contact them.

The 1st success metric is unique click through rate (CTR)(number of link clicks over number of reach), which means out of 100 unique users who see my ads, how many end up clicking “Learn More”.

The 2nd success metric is lead conversion (number of people leaving their contact info over number of link clicks).

Results

I was impressed it was not 0 (perks of having no expectation). Unique CTR of 0.53% is not too bad. And a 33% lead conversion seems high; but honestly, that is 1 lead out of 3 people clicking. The sample size is too small to say anything.

Taking a deeper look at the result breakdown by region, I realise that with a budget of S$10 and too many regions of interest, my ad display frequency is spread too thin. There are regions like Virginia (United States) that only has 2 reach.

Since the regions that give me the highest CTR are Pennsylvania, Queensland (also the region that gives me 1 lead), and Arizona, I decided to rerun the same ad for 1 week but dedicated the S$10 budget to these 3 areas only. Unfortunately, the result did not improve.

Experiment 3: Bring 1 specific title into the spotlight

Instead of showing a collage of book titles, I decided to showcase one book. If people find this book interesting, they can click to learn more. The result is not much different from the first ad’s.

Experiment 4: Allow users to browse through a catalog

Since not everyone would be interested in the one book I chose to advertise, what if I created a mini collection of different titles for people to browse?

I created a simple catalog on Wix that showcases a selected number of titles. If a user is interested in a particular book, they can click to view the book’s synopsis. The final call to action is to click on the “Notify me when it is available” button. Once clicked, the user will be asked to leave his/her email address, which is captured as a lead.

The result is as follows.

Conclusion

After running four experiments, I have a few observations.

1. The unique click-through rate of 0.34%-0.53% across different advertisement approaches is on the low end. It could be because of an ineffective ad design and/or a wrong target audience.
2. The number of leads captured is 1. The cost acquisition of this 1 lead is S$10.
3. While creating my catalog, I realise there is a lack of high-quality contemporary works. Many of the titles I chose were written before the 1980s. Is it a problem? Yes and no. While it is still good to introduce Vietnam’s classics to an international audience, I would love to showcase contemporary works depicting modern life, which is the primary motivation for me to kick-start this idea.

So is there a strong enough demand for English-translated Vietnamese books? I am leaning towards the “no” side.

Maybe there will be more conversion if there is a larger marketing budget, but at what cost of acquisition? Keep in mind that the potential revenue needs to be balanced against the content licensing, translation, and legal costs.

There you have it, the story of how I validated a business idea with less than S$50.