How You Identify Whether Your Business Ideas Are Good or Bad
A huge number of businesses will be launched each year, so it has become forever harder for business owners to come with concepts that have not been exposed to the marketplace before. Although, even where there is a similar product or service, it is still possible to make it individual to your business and come up with a USP, or your unique selling point. With one of these, you can see off much of the competition. Today, we will discuss just how you can identify if your ideas are good or bad. The latter may mean that a start-up business does not last very long, or an existing business ends up on a downward spiral in terms of profitability.
Do Your Ideas Solve a New Problem?
Given how dynamic markets can be, it is a good idea to focus on the needs of the consumer and where they might be heading. Identifying the right consumer trend and then catching it in time will improve the likelihood of you making sales. One of the advantages of being a start-up is that you will at that stage be agile enough to adopt changes, whereas larger corporations will have corporate hoops to need to jump through to make the slightest immediate change to reflect market demand.
Consumer trends are suggestive of becoming more conscious about how they will shop. Purchasing from local providers can also, for instance, be facilitated using digital tools to make a connection. Thinking about the difficulties that might be faced by a consumer in using these tools, such as having to make the decision based on whether a product is sustainable or more costly, will help you to understand how you can help the consumer, who will then help you to make profit. Other problems that might be faced by a consumer may relate to online security that is not sufficient or a lack of home delivery availability.
To know if our product or service will fix any of the issues a user might be presented with, we must ask ourselves: “Are we able to explain clearly our business concept and is it of value in today’s market?”. If we cannot do this, then we may not have found our niche yet. We can use this thinking as the experiment that will test out our business proposal and then help us to refine it. We can then greater understand what our product or service will offer our intended market.
Will Our Ideas Be Solving a Problem That Exists but in a New Way?
There are many solutions that are ineffective that already feature in the market, so it is useful to compare the business idea that we have already with our intended market. Our product or service needs to be better than that of at least our main competitors. It is not about completely reinventing something, just adapting it slightly. We could be undercutting the competition while still able to offer the same quality or better. If you are looking to make an impact in your industry, then a good strategy is essential.
If your business’s idea is more geared to a business-to-business market, then look to focus on demonstrating the value of your product or service. If you take the example of this company greenstone, you can notice how they have an innovative idea of providing sustainable software solutions to businesses that require it to expand their business line. They might perhaps market to a large business market in general. Similarly, you can also take such creative ideas and implement them. Then, after several members of a company have heard your pitch, they should see the benefit. It can also be about working smartly in front of different company representatives, so that they understand more about how your ideas will solve a particular business problem in ways that might be new to a particular demographic.
Are You Already Ahead of the Game?
You might be under the impression that your solution will change large sectors of a market, but this does not suggest that you have any advantage over your competitors. You are going to need to try to reproduce your model. You can, if successful, potentially become a market leader in your field.
The question you should ask is whether your competitors have the potential to easily catch up with your product or service? Or, alternatively, will it be you that is the only one that has a production or service that is functional? Where your main competitors are corporate giants, you should note that their development times will be less because of their funding. Another way of analyzing could be by joining a business mastermind group where other business owners can give useful insights regarding your idea. On that note, you might want to look for a firm that is a global leader in business mastermind groups. They will have greater access to resources. In your case, you should look to focus your time on development and production, remembering to always protect an idea with a trademark or IP.
Carry on with validating the results that you will obtain from your market, being sure to take in all the feedback you receive that will keep your business’s development and production up to date. Be speedy in adapting, as this will be your best weapon against the competition you may face from larger competitors.
Working out if your business idea is good or bad will be possible by accurately assessing your market. You need to know if your product or service will be solving a problem for consumers. Look to research and obtain as much feedback as you can, as this will go a long way in allowing you to quickly adapt to the current state of play and compete with the industry leaders. While doing the market research to understand your customers, you can adopt additional resources and tools like Kano Model, that can help in better understanding your business industry, market, and product requirement. Moreover, you can optimize the data spreadsheet with the help of a Kano Model template provided by service websites. You can get options like attractive needs, must-be needs, performance needs, and indifference based on the collected consumer information.
Never forget that receiving feedback from customers is important to any decision-making process. It helps us to formulate improvements and so to make the right changes to a product or service. If required, you can also look at professional services that will make use of AI technology and machine-learning algorithms that will produce business insights that are based on feedback received. You might find it valuable to learn more about these smart solutions to understand how beneficial they could be to a business idea.
The highly responsive nature of a small business should be taken advantage of to achieve a good market position. This will provide you with the best chance of succeeding.
