The five-day plan, in one sentence
Monday: define the question and the market. Tuesday: read search behaviour. Wednesday: read marketplace activity. Thursday: read forums and reviews. Friday: have three short conversations. Weekend: let it settle. Monday: write the answer.
Two hours a day. Notebook. Spreadsheet. Browser. The whole week is about ten hours of work. If you compress it into a Saturday you'll skim and miss patterns. If you spread it over a month, the picture goes stale and you'll start over. A working week, an hour or two an evening, is the right shape.
Monday: define the question and the market
Write the question down in one sentence. Not "is there demand for bookkeeping?" but "is there enough demand for monthly bookkeeping for solo dental practices in the south of England to support twenty to thirty client retainers over eighteen months?" Sharpness matters. The fuzzier the question, the fuzzier the answer.
Define the market in geographic and customer terms. How many solo dental practices exist within a two-hour drive? Industry directories, professional associations and trade publications give you that number quickly. If the answer is two hundred, you only need to convert ten per cent over eighteen months to hit your goal. If the answer is fifteen, the idea is dead before you start.
Tuesday: search behaviour
Open Google Trends and a free search-ranking tool (most have a generous free tier). Look up the phrases your customer would actually type when they want what you're proposing to sell. Not the phrase you would use as an industry insider - the phrase a non-specialist customer would type.
For a local service, monthly search volume in the low hundreds for your county is often plenty. For a national online product, you usually want phrases searched at least a few thousand times a month combined. Google Trends shows you whether the line is rising, flat or falling over the last five years. A flat line means a stable market. A rising line is a market still being formed. A falling line is a warning - try synonyms before deciding the market is shrinking.
- High volume, rising trend: an opportunity if you can move quickly. Watch for crowding.
- Decent volume, flat trend: a stable market - room for a clearly differentiated offer.
- Low volume, rising trend: an emerging market. Real but small; check whether it's growing fast enough to support you.
- Tiny volume, no trend visible: either too local to register on national tools or not enough demand to build a business on. Use marketplace signals as a tie-break.
Wednesday: marketplace activity
If your idea sells through a marketplace - Etsy, eBay, Amazon, Booking.com, Bark, Checkatrade, Yell - the marketplace itself tells you about demand. How many listings exist for the thing you're proposing? How many of those listings show signs of selling well (recent reviews, sold counts, calendar availability that suggests bookings)? How many listings appear in the top results when a customer searches?
Spend two hours scrolling. Note ten competitors. For each, note their price, their volume signals and the gap they're not serving. By the end of two hours you'll know roughly how busy the market is and where it leaks. If your idea has no marketplace equivalent, skip this and spend the time on the search behaviour from yesterday in more depth.
Thursday: forums, reviews and social
The most undervalued source of small business demand evidence sits in the questions and complaints customers post in public. Reddit, Facebook groups, niche forums, Trustpilot reviews of competitors, Google reviews of similar businesses. Spend two hours reading. Take notes in the customer's exact words.
You're looking for two things. First, repeated questions that suggest a real, unmet need ("can anyone recommend a bookkeeper who actually understands NHS dental contracts?"). Second, repeated complaints about existing options ("the firm I use never replies for three days"). Both are gold. The customer's exact phrasing becomes the headline of your eventual website.
Friday: three short conversations
The hardest hour of the week and the most valuable. Find three people who match your target customer and ask them for twenty minutes. Buy them coffee. Be honest about why you're asking - you're considering starting a business serving people like them and you want to understand their world. The script is in the companion eBook 'Customer Interviews and Buyer Research' and it's worth reading before the calls.
Listen more than you talk. Don't pitch your idea. Ask about their current way of solving the problem (or not solving it), what's annoying about the current options and what would make them pay for a better one. The patterns from three conversations are usually clearer than you'd expect.
The weekend and the verdict
Don't try to write the verdict on Friday night. Sleep on it. On Monday morning, sit down with your notes and write a one-page summary: market size, search signals, marketplace signals, forum patterns, conversation patterns. Then a single sentence at the bottom: yes, this idea has enough demand to bet on; no, it doesn't; or yes, but the customer is slightly different from who I assumed. All three answers are useful.
When the answer is "not quite"
Often the demand exists but for a slightly different version of the idea than you started with. The bookkeeper-for-dentists candidate might come back as bookkeeper-for-allied-health (dentists, physios, chiropractors, all running similar practices). The setup-only software service might come back as setup-plus-three-months-of-handholding. Don't treat "not quite" as a no. Treat it as the customer telling you the actual shape of the demand.
What to do this week
Pick your highest-scoring candidate from the previous chapter. Block out an hour or two each evening this week and put the four sources in your diary. Write the verdict on the following Monday morning. If the verdict is yes, move into the next chapter. If it's no, take the next-highest candidate through the same week. Most owners-to-be need to do this for two or three candidates before one comes out clearly.
Prove demand before spending heavily. The principle this chapter is built on. The companion eBook 'Market Research for Small Businesses' goes deeper into each of the four sources once you've chosen your one idea. The next chapter, on reading the competition, is the next test that survives demand needs to pass.
