Many people become entrepreneurs because they have a brilliant idea that they want to bring to market. But what if you feel a passionate drive to be an entrepreneur, but don’t yet know how to get started? Where, exactly, do great entrepreneurs get their killer business ideas?
Do What You Love
What’s your passion? What’s the thing that you’ll avoid your friends for, cancel plans for, save money for? What’s the thing that you love more than anything else?
One of the great things about pursuing entrepreneurship is that you have full control of your career. If you want to spend your life creating knitting or sewing patterns, developing mobile gaming apps, or showing tourists through the historic sections of your town, you can do that – as long as you can figure out a way to monetize it.
Look at your passion. Are other people doing what you want to be doing? Ask one of them for advice on how to get started. If you think you’ve come up with something incredibly unique, you’re probably wrong; someone, somewhere, has started something similar and built it into a success.
Bring An Old Product To A New Market
You’ve heard that food delivery businesses are booming, and your town doesn’t have one. A particular demographic has been traditionally underserved by a business, market, or economy. Social media is booming, and there’s an opportunity to create a community around a particular product, service, or demographic that isn’t currently finding space.
Bringing an old product to a new market can be a great business plan. It usually helps if you have some connection to the market in question. Ravelry has become an incredibly successful social media site for knitters in part because the founders were knitters, and understood what the cross section of tech-savvy knitters would want in their connections. Goulet Pens has leveraged content marketing in a way that few retail stores do, producing huge amounts of free content that educate and inform users about fountain pens and papers. This worked because the founder, Brian Goulet, has loved fountain pens for many years, and was in tune with what enthusiasts would want to know the products that he sold.
Knitters, social media, and fountain pens, all existed before these businesses, but because the founders had an irreplaceable story for presenting the product to a market that wasn’t adequately served, they found success.
Deliver A New Product To An Existing Market
This is somewhat trickier than selling an established product. You not only need to explain the value of the product to the market, you need to overcome their resistance, which is usually based around the idea that whatever they’re using now is “good enough” or “just fine.”
For example, if you have a great product idea for a new type of baby carrier that you think mothers will love, you’re not only going to need to show them all the usual things – that it’s priced right, attractive, and affordable – but you’re also going to need to convince them that it’s better than the baby carriers they already use.
Bringing new products to markets that already exist is often easier when you’re a member of the market in question. For example, when you can say “As a mother, I struggled to find a baby carrier that worked for my baby because…” and “This carrier solved my problem because…”
Do not try to claim an identity that you don’t have. This is the age of the Internet; people will find out, and it will destroy their faith in your company.
There are many different values that you can see within entrepreneurs, but one that is common is a certain restlessness. Entrepreneurs tend not to be satisfied with good enough, tend to look for new ways to tackle old problems, and search for new problems that need to be solved. They see opportunities wherever they look, and they don’t give up when they’re faced with difficulties.
If you want to be successful as an entrepreneur, it’s a good idea to begin to contemplate this mindset, and look for ways to bring it into your day to day life. Look for opportunities, keep notes on things that continuously annoy you, and consider ways to solve those problems.
Your killer business idea will arrive before you know it.
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