Mitra has put together a set of questions that will help entrepreneurs through the process of testing and validating their idea and building an effective go-to-market strategy for a consumer facing business.

• Who is your target customer/user?

• What is the user experience you plan to offer?

• Does the customer/user care? Why?

• What is your differentiated value proposition to the customer/user?

• Which market? Which segment? What demographic? What psychographic?

• How big is the market? Is it big enough? How do you expand, if not? Do you need to expand, or is staying within the niche desirable?

• What is the usage model?

• How does the user currently accomplish the objective?

• What is the competition and how do you position against them?

• What is the business model? On-Demand? Subscription? Advertising? Transaction fee ?

• How do you build traffic? What FREE incentive can you offer to bring users en masse to your site?

• What premium service can you offer that users would want to pay for? How much would they pay?

• What is your context strategy?

• What is your content strategy?

• What is your commerce strategy?

• What is your community strategy?

• What is your search strategy?

• What is your personalisation strategy?

• How do you plan to sell advertisements (ad)? Internal ad sales force? Ad networks? Which ones? What kind of ad rates can you command?

• What ad management system will you use if you do it internally?

• Are you going to advertise online to recruit customers? Google/Yahoo! PPC? On blogs and other sites? Which sites? Using which ad networks?

• What are your search engine marketing/search engine optimisation strategies? What keywords are you trying to own/position around? How expensive are they?

• For your category, what are the most influential blogs? How will you get them to talk about you?

• What are the top mainstream media properties that you need to get written up in?

• Whom do you need to partner with to offer a full solution/whole product?

• Whom do you partner with to generate traffic? Under what terms?

• Do you have a widget strategy for Facebook, iPhone, Hi5, MySpace, etc. to generate traffic and visibility?

*Source: www.sramanamitra.com