Is 10 sales enough to validate my business idea?

Usually when entrepreneurs talk about market validation, they're talking about whether or not an audience exists that would pay for a new product. In the tech scene, this is usually done because the product has never existed before and is a Hot New Thing. When you can, you're supposed to validate the market way before having an actual product or sales. In your case, sports posters have already existed and been sold for decades. The market exists and is validated. The question is whether or not your business is validated, which is a different question. The answer to that is based on your finances. Are you making profits, can you pay for marketing, what is your business goal, etc. Those are the questions you'll need to answer, and we as a forum unfortunately can't really do that for you. Best of luck!

For B2C merch, setting up an Instagram influencer partnership with is a common marketing channel.

Do you have any posters on hand that you can send to influencers to post about with a link to your store? If not, can you create an awesome looking IG post that feature on of your posters to have an influencer use?

It depends.
How hard is for you to get another 1500 visitors on your website? (like pay to other influencers to promote or make partnerships)
How much profit do you make on each sale?
Can be automated?
Can you raise your conversion rate from 1,5% to 3% and double your sales?
Good luck on your business.

~1% conversion rate is a good sign of validating ideas. Remember, if you are going into a niche market, the popularity would only be around 2% of total.

I'd suggest you talk to those 10 people first to see if your site solve a real problem, and how it compared with others. If you are the rock start in this field, traffic won't be a hard problem. (SEO, campaigns on Twitter/FB, community etc.)

NO, 10 sales isn't. Because it depends on the time frame. 10 sales over 10 years, no. 10 sales over 10 minutes? yes.

Even 10 sales over 10 years - if 9 of those sales came in the last week, when you changed marketing strategy? Then probably.

Ads are meant to be an option because the idea is for every dollar you spend on ads, you get a dollar + something in sales. But of course, ads also require some initial effort to find the ideal market. You might want to ask at clothing stores who are the main buyers - demographics, i mean - of sporting memorabilia. You can probably also look this data up online, although you might need to spend money to access such data.

Your primary marketing strategy will require you to spend money, however, as what you're doing is not "viral". If you an influencer retweeted your first post, then it might be that paying other influencers to retweet/share your work will be profitable.

You will again need to work out which influencer is best - presumably a sporting person. Why not send some sporting influencers some of your goods, and if they like it they'll possibly share that. That's a relatively cheap way to market.

Just make sure you're tracking with facebook/google/everything all your visitors and then think hard about who is best to target.

This comment was deleted 8 years ago