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Happy, Healthy, & Wealthy Therapists | Ep 56: How to Know If You Actually Have Proof of Concept

September 11, 2026

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Released: 9/11/2026

Show Notes:

Proof of concept is one of those phrases that gets thrown around a lot in business spaces without a lot of clarity on what it actually means or when you actually have it. Amanda gets into why most people misread their own data, what it actually means when a launch goes quiet, and why changing your price or restructuring your offer means you’re running a completely new experiment, not a continuation of the last one. If you’ve ever had something work, then changed one thing and watched it stop working, and concluded the whole idea was dead, this episode is going to push back on that.

3 Key Takeaways:

  1. Proof of concept is tied to the exact conditions you tested, including the price, offer format, and marketing message, so the moment you change any of those variables you are running a new experiment that needs its own evidence, not borrowing credibility from the old one.
  2. A single opt-in, a booked discovery call, or one sale are all real proof of concept, and you do not need scale or a perfect launch to know that people want the transformation you are offering.
  3. When a launch goes quiet, the instinct to scrap the whole idea is almost always the wrong read; what the data is actually telling you is that this specific version at this specific price with this specific amount of visibility has not been validated yet, which is a solvable problem, not a verdict.

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Transcript:

Amanda Buduris (00:00)
Hey, welcome back to the Happy, Healthy, and Wealthy Therapist Podcast. I am gonna dive in because I’m feeling I’m feeling energized by a topic that has been coming up a lot in coaching calls that I’ve had this week with people in my mastermind. And it’s something that I hear about a lot generally when we think about, you know, this isn’t even just about diversifying your income streams. This is very applicable to

Therapy practices as well, but we always have this question around this concept of proof of concept, right? Like how do I actually know I have something that people want? Whether that is a specific therapy service or offering, whether that is a digital hand, not digital hand, what digital product or something like that.

If there’s something that you’re trying to put in front of people, right? Whether that is a service, whether that is a digital product, whether that’s something physical that you want to put in their hands. So we all have these ideas, right? And we think about marketing them. We want to put it out there. The steps to doing that are essentially you have to identify: here is the thing I want to put out there, right? Is it a

Coaching program, is it one-to-one coaching? Is it a EMDR intensive for breakups? Is it a workbook on healing from inner child wounds? Whatever it is, right? So we spend all this time developing the details around that, building up marketing like a website. Maybe you do organic Instagram marketing, maybe you look at paid marketing, if that’s Google Ads or Meta ads. So you spend all this time.

And energy and effort and maybe money if you are hiring a coach or even just building up the systems like Kajabi, Thrivecart, all that kind of stuff. So you’re spending all this time and energy and money because ultimately what you hope is that there is proof of concept, right? You want to make sure, hey, this thing actually works and I can keep scaling it. I can keep selling it, whether that’s I can now definitely sell my therapy hour for.

225 and above, or I can definitely sell this coaching program for 997. Right. So what typically happens for people is they launch something and they get some interest, right? Let’s say even you start by launching an opt-in, whether that’s again for your therapy practice of tips for overcoming XYZ, or whether you’re trying to do more digital products or coaching program about, you know, the best ways to

Do ABC, whatever it is. It’s kind of hard to work in generalities like this. But you put it out there, you get some opt-ins to your email list. You maybe get people scheduling discovery calls. You maybe get someone buy a low-ticket product from you, like a little $7 workbook or something like that. So you get really excited. You’re like, okay, cool. This clearly is working. Now let’s change the offer up a little bit. And usually what most people do in the

Coaching or digital product realm specifically, most people start with what’s called a beta test or a beta launch, where they offer the thing for the lowest cost it’ll ever be for the purpose of, okay, right, let’s get anyone through this and then get some testimonials out of it. All well and good. That’s exactly how I started my coaching business. But then the problem becomes, right? The whole reason we do a beta test is let’s see.

If anyone will buy this product, so maybe let’s do a really low cost offer and to try to get anybody in. And then people do, right? They sell a few spots of a program for a very low cost. They sell a course for a very low cost. And in the theme of scaling the impact of, you know, the reach of what we’re putting out there, scaling the income that we’re looking for, then what people do is okay, let me raise the price, right? And then

All of a sudden, right? We changed one thing and our opt-ins start slowing down and the discovery calls start drying up or nobody says yes or no one buys or whatever it is. And it can be really easy for a business person to decide, well, the whole idea is a failure. There is no proof of concept. Nobody actually wants what I put all this time, energy, effort, and money into. And that feels really shitty.

Right. Like it that does not feel good. What I would say all of us high achieving people want is for everything to be easy every time. We want to launch something and have it go amazingly from the get-go. We want to prove that we’re just really good at what we do and that people want the thing we spent all this time crafting. But in general, here’s what I think is actually happening. Right? You

Put together this thing, you maybe do a beta launch of it, you launch it for the lowest price you’ll ever offer it. And what people think is that they lose that proof of concept. But the thing is that you never really had proof of concept for the new thing, right? If you offered a low-cost course or program, or you offered a workbook, but now you’re wondering why no one’s buying the course, you start to lose the original concept you got.

Proof for because you’re actually testing something different than what you think you’re testing. So today I’m gonna spend some time just kind of untangling this and what this really looks like because I think it might be one of the most misunderstood ideas in building any kind of offer. Again, whether that’s a therapy practice, a coaching program, a digital product, whatever it is. So really we have to think about this question of how you actually know.

If you have proof of concept and why so many of us abandon good ideas, because we’re asking the wrong version of that question. So, first I want to define that term because you know, once we start to hear something on social media, I think we use it a little bit too loosely. We all don’t have like the same understanding of what exactly we’re talking about when we use the phrase proof of concept. What that phrase really means at its core is.

You have evidence that people want the transformation you are offering. And that evidence shows up in a handful of very specific and measurable places. So again, are people opting in when you are offering something free or low commitment? Are people booking a discovery call when you offer them a conversation? Are people saying yes and paying you when you offer them a way to work with you? Any one of those on its own, at its own point.

is proof of concept. Again, want to say that again. Opt-ins are proof of concept. Discovery calls are proof of concept. A single sale is proof of concept. You do not need all three stacked together and you do not need them to happen at scale for the underlying idea to be validated. If a handful of people raise their hands for your wait list, that tells you something. People are curious about it. If someone booked a call with you

That tells you something. Someone believed this conversation was worth their time. And if someone paid you, that really tells you something. someone believed that what you offered was worth their money. So here is why all of this matters. A lot of us treat this proof of concept like it’s a light switch, right? It’s either fully on or it’s fully off. And we let one disappointing launch convince us that the switch is off.

Permanently for the whole idea, right? We would rather scrap it, move on, maybe because it feels a little bit embarrassing, right? There have for sure been times where I’ve launched something and no one’s triggered my many chat automation for the sale. Or tons of people were like, I can’t wait to buy this and to sign up for this, and then no one did, or like one person did. The number of Facebook lives I have done.

I do not do them anymore. I closed my Facebook group earlier this year because it was just more than I wanted to manage. And honestly, I didn’t think I was good at it. I like leading live groups, not asynchronous groups. And you know, there were tons of times where I did those lives and nobody signed on for it. But then people would watch the recording. So proof of concept is not a verdict on like forever, your ideas suck and they will never work.

Proof of concept is a snapshot of a specific moment under specific conditions. And that distinction is exactly where things start to get confusing for a lot of business owners because again, most of us don’t actually notice when the conditions might have changed. So when we think about again, you launch something for the first time or you launch like a mini offering of it, but your goal is ultimately to scale it, make more money from it, whatever it is. Again.

Most people increase the price and then they get disappointed when it doesn’t sell at the increased price. So proof of concept is tied to the exact thing you tested, the exact price, the exact offer, the exact promise you made. The second you change any of those things, you are no longer running the same experiment. You’re running a new one. And a new experiment needs its own proof of

Concept, it does not get to borrow the proof from the old one. So to make this really, really concrete, say you have been offering a coaching package at $500 and it’s been selling pretty steadily, right? And you’re like, cool, this is exciting. People are opting in, they’re booking calls, they say yes. That is real proof of concept for that offer at that price. Now let’s say you decide to raise the price to $2,000 or you decide to

Restructure the whole thing into a longer, more intensive container. You launch it, and then nobody’s booking calls. No one is expressing interest. The one or two people who do get on a call just kind of ghost you afterwards, or they’re like, I’ll think about it or I’ll get back to you. And then they never get back to you. What a lot of us then do in that moment, because it’s disappointing, because we don’t like it, because we don’t like feeling like we’re failures, who don’t know what we’re doing.

is we start to collapse the two experiments into one story. We think, well, I had proof of concept and now I don’t. So the whole thing was never real. But again, that is not what happened. What happened was you tested a new hypothesis, which is a higher price point or a different offer structure, and that specific hypothesis didn’t get validated yet. The original proof of concept, the one that told you people wanted the transformation at $500,

That one is still true. It didn’t just go away. It just doesn’t automatically transfer to a completely new offer. Right. So if you are someone, whether you are a therapist who’s working on taking your weekly clients and wanting more intensive clients, whether you are someone who launched a course at a super cheap price and now you want to charge a higher price for it, all of this applies to you, right? Like as soon as you

Test the first offer. Okay, weekly sessions. Great. People definitely want that. It is okay to assume people are going to want intensive offers, but just because someone says no to an intensive, whatever the reason, not the right price, not the right time, not with you, which is okay. Then it doesn’t mean nobody wants your weekly offers. It just means no one wants the intensive that you’ve put together quite yet. And that also means the small subset of people who have gotten on a call with you or read your page.

Are you saying no? It does not mean everyone is saying no. So do not scrap what it is that you’re doing, right? We have to look at data ultimately. That is why I love spreadsheets. That is why I love numbers. That is why I’m always asking my coach. I need a like a sanity check on this. I literally just sent her that message about an hour ago. I was like, this is what the data is looking like, and I don’t think it’s making sense. Am I missing something? Because

I don’t want to make a decision based out of my emotions, which generally are anxiety. I want to make decisions based on data. And data shows, again, specific offers at specific prices with a specific type of or amount of marketing either have or haven’t been validated yet. Right? That is a very different story than nobody wants this and it’s not gonna work and it’s never gonna sell at this price. No, it just means.

You had a validated offer. You had proof of concept for the very specific thing that did sell or was successful or did lead to opt-ins, but you don’t have it for the new thing yet, right? That is literally all that means. And we need to really think about that distinction because it is uncomfortable to sit in. I will be the first person to say that. It is much easier to declare that the whole idea is just dead.

Right, rather than to admit that you only tested one narrow version of it and the test came back inconclusive. Right? That is all that that is. But if you can hold on to the distinction between the concept and the specific conditions you tested it under, then you can stop throwing all of your really good ideas into the dumpster just because you had one disappointing round of results.

Testing and retesting is literally the whole game when it comes to running a business. And once you see it this way, I really do think a lot can shift for you because business can stop looking like it’s just, okay, this works, this doesn’t work, this works, this doesn’t work. It can actually look like what it is, which is an ongoing series of tests. I am always testing everything, right? Every time I launch my Therapy Intensives Academy, every time I launch my

Happy, healthy, and wealthy therapist mastermind. Every time I launch my SEO membership, which is currently about to be renamed to feel more accurate to what it is, right? That is a test. So that is all we do because we have to know what is the thing right now that is working. Because times are always changing, right? People are always changing, marketing is always changing. So this is not unique to therapy, it is not unique to coaching.

It’s not unique to digital products. This is anyone who is selling anything. I don’t know about you, but I feel like post-COVID everything became a freaking like subscription and membership model. Like the massage therapist I was going to, it’s like, have you heard of our massage memberships? And the eyelash extension place I go to, have you heard about our monthly subscription? Like that didn’t exist before, but people tested it and they saw.

It works. And generally, I think that there is pros and cons to it, right? Like when I’ve signed up for any of those monthly subscription things, I generally save money, maybe like $10 to $20 a service. But if I miss my service for the month, then I am out that money and the company makes that money. So people are testing in business.

What is ultimately the thing that works for them? And unfortunately, some businesses care more about like profit than people. And that is a thing that I like a lot of us are fighting against. But again, none of this is unique to just us, right? Like this is just business. You make an offer under a specific set of conditions, price, format, audience message, and then you watch what happens. Right. And then if you change one of those conditions, you have to watch again.

Because every single change ultimately is resetting part of the test that you’re doing. So think about a therapist who’s filling their caseload with insurance panels, for example. That is proof of concept for one set of conditions in network, standard session length, standard rate. If that therapist decides to go out of network and raise their private pay rate, they have the same clinical still. They are the same person, but it’s a completely different test.

Fact that clients said yes to insurance rate tells that therapist nothing certain about whether they’ll say yes to private pay rates. They have to run that test fresh. All right, okay, so think about a coach who’s been selling one-to-one packages for a year. Steady proof of concept, they decide to build a group program instead. It’s got the same core materials, just a different format, different price point, different promise about how much individual attention people get. That is a new test.

The fact that people paid for one-on-one doesn’t guarantee they’ll pay for group, even though the transformation underneath is similar. Same thing is said for someone who’s launching a digital course. You might sell the first round at this founding members rate to build initial buyers and get those testimonials. Again, proof of concept for that price, for that scarcity of lowest cost ever, and with that framing. But if you raise that price for round two,

You remove the founding member language. Maybe you remove you offered like bonus live support and now you’re not offering that anymore. You are running a new test, even though it is the exact same offering. So again, none of these examples mean that you as a business owner are doing anything wrong the second time around. It just means what you are building, you know, actually requires testing, watching, adjusting, and testing again.

The businesses and the business owners that survive long enough to actually feel stable, they are not the ones who nailed it on the first try and never had to test it again. They are the ones who get comfortable treating every change as its own small experiment instead of just this, like, you know, something that is set in stone and determines their worth, their ideas. I, for example, just tested my Therapy Intenses Academy. I launched it at the end of August.

  1. And I was like, I’m gonna put way more money behind ads than I ever have for a given launch. I think in total it was maybe like eight or nine thousand dollars. It was a lot because in theory, I wanted to test can I get more sales than I’ve ever gotten before during a launch period if I put more money behind ads. And what I saw was I made almost about the exact same amount. Normally I

Literally at each time that I’ve launched this, it’s been like 37 sales, 37 sales, and this past one was 34 sales. So less sales, which is totally fine because I’m still really happy with the results, but I spent more on ads. And when my coach and I looked at the data of why didn’t it result in more sales, like I kind of expected and predicted and used this calculator that I got from this ads course that I’m a part of, well, we saw that a lot of my ads were going to cold.

Traffic and cold traffic needs a lot more time to warm up and they might convert into something because they’re gonna be a much more expensive conversion than a warm lead, someone who’s known you for a while and just like needed to know that you had a sale going on. So that data made sense. It makes sense, and it means the next time I test a launch, I’m gonna test things a little bit differently. I learned a lot from that launch. So

How do you actually continue testing without freaking out? Because I do not want you to spiral every time a launch doesn’t perform the way that you would want it to. So here are some things that I would offer you. First, change just one variable at a time when you can. If you raise your price and rewrite your offer and switch your marketing message all in the same month and everything just like, okay, where the opt-ins go, where the discovery calls go.

You have no idea which piece caused it. You’ve actually made it impossible to learn anything. We need to as much as possible isolate the variable so the test actually tells you something, right? It’s like we’re back in grad school. And if you’re like me, even back in undergrad, I did a lot of classes that had labs as a component. And my god, the number of times we said isolate the variable, isolate the variable. I just felt like I was back in school. So definitely do that one change at a time. Second.

If things are quiet, whether that’s no one opt-ins, no one buys, no one enrolls, no one books a call, whatever it is, treat that as data, right? Just because you did a price increase and you know didn’t get anything from that, you didn’t get any sales, at a minimum, what that means is that that specific price point hasn’t been validated with this specific amount of visibility yet.

It does not mean your work lacks value. It does not mean the original proof of concept was fake. Just hold those two facts separately, right? Like we’re all about dialectics as therapists. So it doesn’t mean it’s not gonna work and it’s never gonna work. It just means we need to maybe like pause, rewind, try something closer to the thing that had proof of concept, and then work on scaling it back up with time. Sometimes people just

Launch something too close back to back and change too much in that time. And that’s why something feels like it breaks, or again, doesn’t give you the results you were looking for. So third, look for the actual signals, look for the data. Do not just look at those feelings in your body, right? Again, how many opt-ins, how many calls booked, how many sales did you make? Those are all observable facts and data.

The panic, the doubt, the story that you’re telling yourself about what it means, right? That I suck, that nobody wants this, that it’s never gonna work. That’s not the same thing as Tata. When a launch feels disappointing, go look at the actual numbers before you decide anything about the idea itself. I was looking at one of my mastermind members.

Email performance. And was like, you got opens into your emails, you got clicks into your emails. That means people were interested because just because they didn’t buy, that doesn’t mean they’re not interested. It just means they didn’t want to buy under the conditions of this launch, right? The timeline, the pricing, the deliverables, whatever it is, we won’t know unless we like literally ask people on the email list, hey, why didn’t you buy? Which you could, but

It does not mean no one’s interested. If no one opened your email list, if no one clicked on those emails, that might be, you know, some of that data around, like, yeah, people may not be interested. Or again, we got to look at timing too. Think about Black Friday, think about holidays when people are not checking their emails. Like your email performance probably tanks, your click through rate probably tanks. And that’s all normal. That doesn’t mean nobody wants stuff that you’re offering. Fourth, give a new

Test enough exposure before you call it. Right. Saying one posting one social post about a new higher priced offer is not the same sample size as months of visibility your original offer had before it started converting. Just because you might have had a quiet week, right? Again, it’s not proof of concept failing. It just means you need to still get more evidence and you need more visibility. Like I said, spending

However many thousands of dollars on ads that I did, I think it was closer to 9,000. I got a ton of visibility. I got so many people clicking on that webpage. Usually I get maybe 2,000 clicks onto my page with my of people who open my emails. It’s usually about 5,000, 5500, something like that. So to get normally 2,000 clicks is still really, really good. But because so much cold traffic saw my ads this time around.

There were like 8,000 or 9,000 page views, which was a ton. But again, a lot of that is cold traffic. A lot of those people don’t know me yet. They haven’t heard me talk. They haven’t gotten a chance to know me. And again, always, but especially in this economy, people want to know more about you before they choose to invest their money in you. So just because something didn’t work this time does not mean it will not work ever.

Right. So that is something that is really, really important that I want you to remember, whether that’s your therapy practice or something you’re building outside of your therapy practice, the thing I really, really want you to take away is any data points like opt-ins, discovery calls, sales at any point. Again, those are real proof of concept. But the moment you change the price or the offer, you’re running a new test, and that test really needs its own chance to gather evidence before you decide what it means.

That is the whole game in therapy, in coaching, in digital projects. You test, you watch, you adjust, you test again. Do not let one quiet round convince you that the idea was never going to be successful, never gonna work. And again, you do not suck. I don’t know many people who suck. If I do, I don’t talk to them, right? So you are probably really, really good at what you do. Trust yourself, be patient with yourself, and be willing to test again.

Right. Be willing to try and fail. Those of us who try and fail generally are the ones who are most successful because we keep trying and we learn from the data as opposed to giving everything up. So I hope that was helpful for you today. Whether you are, again, really just working in your therapy practice and growing it and trying to get therapy clients. I know we’re coming right out of the summer slump that a lot of therapists face. So sending you lots of positive vibes on people getting back into, you know.

their fall schedule, getting out of school, out of their summer routine, and hopefully calls pick up for everyone. Whether you are diversifying your income and you just launched something and you’re questioning whether you ever want to do it again, be patient. Trust that you know what you’re doing, reach out for people who can support you if you are confused about, I don’t know how to look at data. What data do I look at? That’s a lot of the work that I do inside my mastermind. I also work with clients one-to-one at various points in time.

So really want to appreciate you for being here and letting me talk with you today. And I’ll look forward to seeing you and being in your ear next week. Thanks. Bye.

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