Before You Quit Your Job: Testing a Business Idea Properly
- Focused on practical entrepreneurship — real decisions, not theory
- Live format with direct access to the presenter and Q&A time
- Accessible from anywhere — no travel required
What the session covers
Workshop structure
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Welcome and context 10:00 am
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The assumption audit: listing what you believe about your customer 10:15 am
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Mapping current behaviour: what does your customer do right now? 10:50 am
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Break 11:20 am
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Designing a minimum viable test 11:35 am
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Reading feedback without wishful thinking 12:15 pm
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Individual planning: your next two weeks 12:45 pm
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Group share and close 1:15 pm
About the format
This is a working session, not a lecture. Participants bring their own ideas and work on them throughout the day. Bring a notebook or laptop. There are no slides to take home because the output is your own validation plan, not a deck someone else made.
About this webinar
The gap between an idea that feels promising and one that actually generates revenue is where most early ventures stall. This workshop addresses that gap directly. It is built around one central question: how do you find out if people will pay for something before you have built it?
Facilitator Cormac Whelan spent three years advising early-stage founders through a regional enterprise office. He has seen the same pattern repeatedly: people invest months in building a product or service, then discover the market is smaller or more resistant than expected. The workshop draws on those observations.
What the session covers
Participants work through a structured process for identifying their assumed customer, mapping what that customer currently does instead of using the proposed product or service, and designing a simple test that generates real feedback. This is not theoretical. Everyone leaves with a specific test they can run within the following two weeks.
The session also covers how to interpret ambiguous feedback honestly, which is harder than it sounds. People are polite. Friends are supportive. Neither of those things tells you whether a stranger will hand over money.
There is a short section on when validation data is strong enough to justify moving forward, and what moving forward actually means at this stage. It does not mean quitting employment immediately. It means a defined next step with a clear measure attached to it.