How to successfully find a good business idea?

Businesses exist to solve peoples’ problems – problem solve, the money gained!

When your customer’s problems are solved, there’s satisfaction knowing that you have helped someone with their pain points by creating or giving value to them.

As a by-product, you are making some money out of the value transaction.

This is entrepreneurship.

Entrepreneurship demystified

Entrepreneurship about the pursuit of opportunity while managing the risk of failure and opportunities for success.

There are three parts to this:

• Pursuit – These are actions of an entrepreneur that consist of the drive, resiliency, focus, discipline, and balance to be successful.
• Opportunity – It’s finding a better, cheaper, or more efficient offering for the customer that reduces their pain or increases their success.
• Risk – It’s managing the risks and opportunities that may impact on your success.

To make money know thy customer well

The single most important thing any entrepreneur must do is to spend time getting to know their customer.

By developing a deep understanding of your customer and their pain points or needs, you can develop a stronger product and business model to meet their expectations.

When needs and expectations are met, you make money out of the transaction.

Often, your customer will be different from the end-user. Businesses make the mistake of optimising a solution for end-users, not customers.

The customer is whoever will be buying your solution with their money, though the person who obtains value from what you develop may be different.

Opportunities are everywhere

The process of gradual yet continual modification of our business ideas will be the foundation upon which we seek to create new ventures into reality as we allow data-driven analysis and keen observation of our customers shape our ideas.

When starting new businesses, you have to be willing to take risks, make mistakes, and learn from these mistakes.

So, how do you find that business idea that will solve a customer’s problem and help that person who is in “pain”?

Firstly, identify the problems that your customers are facing.

Secondly, identify and test solutions that will solve your customer’s problems.

Thirdly, identify and sell the benefits (not the features) of your solution to your customer. Where possible, identify quantitative measures of success.

Finally, be selective and deliver your solutions in the most cost-effective manner that will be valuable to your customers using an implementation plan.

Identifying problems through field observations

Unbiased objective field observation is central to discovering unmet needs of people based on principles of human-centred design. It’s firmly grounded in real needs.

Field observations also uncover potential problems people face.

Observation and lateral thinking are the keys to successful innovation and idea generation. Look for ways that current customers aren’t fully satisfied with the solutions currently available.

Observation is the core entrepreneurial skill that will benefit you greatly.

It’s a practice of active personal reflection. You can start a journal to record your thoughtful analysis of new insights that you have gained through observations.

You may want to start by:

• Thinking big.
• Listening to people’s under-served needs or frustrations.
• Read online customer reviews of current offerings and identify their biggest unmet needs.
• Visit sites like http://www.coolbusinessideas.com and http://www.springwise.com for inspiration.

Other sources include:

• Audience surveys – SurveyMonkey, Google Surveys, SurveyGizmo, Zoho Survey, Typeform, etc.
• B2B wholesale marketplaces
• Consumer lifestyle publications
• Crowdsourcing
• Industry leaders
• Look to the past
• Online consumer marketplaces – eBay, Amazon, Kickstarter, Aliexpress, Etsy, etc.
• Online consumer trend publications – Trendhunter, Trendwatching, PSFK
• On-site and third-party customer reviews
• Product and trend discovery sites (Popular consumer product blogs – Uncrate, AHALife, Bless This Stuff, Cool Material, GearMoose, Werd, HiConsumption, Firebox)
• SEO analytics and insights – Search engine optimisation (SEO), Google Trends, Google Keyword Planner, Google Analytics, Google search, etc.
• Social curation sites
• Social forum communities – Reddit, Quora
• Social media networks – Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, etc.
• Your competitors
• Your local community

In essence, you have to go out and observe people in their own environment much like an anthropologist observes.

It’s important to note and document what you find or observe by answering these questions:

• What’s exactly is your customers trying to achieve (i.e., their objectives)?
• What problems are they trying to resolve?
• How are they doing this?
• What results are they getting, if any?
• What underlying need has prompted this behaviour?
• What alternatives exist?
• Are they willing and able to pay for solutions?

Write down all the problems that come to mind no matter how silly they seem. Go for quantity as this isn’t the time to be filtering, yet. This will comes later.

Market research is the process of gathering information about your customer’s needs and preferences. There are lots of ways to get input from customers. Some include:

• Interviews or observations.
• Internet research.
• Surveys.

There are advantages to each of the different research methods, though the advantages of interviews, in particular, makes them most suited to this early stage.

Interviews allow you to get actionable insights into your customer needs. It enables you to build your minimum viable product.

Unfortunately, many of us design things in a vacuum or a lab – it’s mostly with our own opinions of what is important to the customer.

It’s also usually what is most important to us. This internally focused process is doomed to fail.

Instead, we must be focusing on our customer’s unmet needs.