How to come up with a business idea, or What prevents people from starting their own business

• Stanislav Milonin
• 2 055

Let's start with this: each of us is capable of coming up with a million-dollar idea.
This is not higher mathematics or rocket science. In principle, all successful businessmen are ordinary people who at one point “gave birth” to an idea and decided to implement it. And the only thing that distinguishes them from you is their persistence in putting these ideas into practice. That's all. So how do you come up with creative business ideas? Here are some tips:

SIMPLIFY THE COMPLEX

For some reason, many manufacturers believe that the more functions a product has, the wider the target audience will be. Accordingly, the more money you can earn from it. But often too much functionality scares off a potential buyer. Just imagine, you go to the store to choose an ordinary kitchen knife for cutting bread, and you are persistently offered to buy a Swiss folding knife for 42 items.

Sometimes it is enough to simplify the product and make it more specialized in order to get a sought-after item. Just think about which products you use frequently could be simplified. Which features do you want to remove and which do you want to keep? And after that, you can safely release a new product that will definitely get your client.

Do what you like

Competitiveness is important for small businesses, which comes from having good skills, experience and knowledge in one area. A hobby is a potentially profitable business idea, but it requires a smart marketing strategy and research. Often a hobby remains just a hobby due to a reluctance to learn other skills to implement a business. For example, a small business in the service sector requires a campaign with elements of Internet marketing, for which a novice entrepreneur does not have enough funds. The matter will not move forward and will be in the red if the owner continues to do only his favorite pastime. How to come up with an idea for a business from scratch and where to look for it if you don’t like anything?

• area of ​​interest;
• education;
• skills;
• Childhood dreams;
• desired career.

When there are no special preferences, it is more profitable to focus on business profits rather than on the idea itself. The absence of restrictions in choosing a field of activity will allow you to abandon an unpromising idea in time.

CREATE MORE IDEAS

The more ideas you have, the more likely it is that one or more of them will turn out to be truly interesting and workable. Perhaps one of them will make you a real millionaire and provide the life you have always dreamed of.

“The best method for generating a good business idea is to come up with a lot of ideas and choose the strongest one.” Evgeniy Deineko

Create as much as possible! But you shouldn’t jump right in and try to implement them all. Set aside dedicated time to generate ideas. For example, one month. During this time, try to sketch out as many ideas as possible.

And after that, another month to critically analyze these ideas and choose among them the one that seems the most promising.

How to come up with a business idea

Although the word “start-up”, which in translation from English means “to start” or “launch”, is used to refer to recently created companies, it is not entirely correct to apply it to any new business. A startup is, first of all, an innovative idea that can be developed in the future and bring big profits. You need to start your business by searching for a unique idea.

To find an idea for a startup, experts recommend analyzing a number of factors, including:

• own motivation: desires, skills;
• capabilities, skills;
• interests and needs of the target audience;
• competition in the business market in a specific niche.

After analyzing all the items on the list, it will be much easier to find a successful idea for a startup.

The leaders of the “Business Youth” project, Mikhail Dashkiev and Pyotr Osipov, share one of the options for generating a business idea:

Assessing your skills and hobbies

When starting your own business, it is important to understand that, unlike working for hire, in this case you cannot simply quit or go home early. Money, time and effort are invested in a startup, which no one can get back if it fails. Therefore, it is worth coming up with a business idea taking into account your own hobbies and interests. This should be a comfortable area to which the soul lies. Owning your own business, especially at the initial stage, often requires working seven days a week, holidays and holidays. So let it be a pleasant pastime.

Elena Skriptunova, General Director of Aksima LLC, believes that a business idea will be a failure if it is not able to “ignite”, inspire, force you to give up everything and focus only on its implementation.

In addition to your inclinations, you also need to evaluate your abilities. You should not be afraid of the new and unexplored; new knowledge and skills can and should be acquired. Nevertheless, there must be a rational grain in everything. If it is too difficult to obtain and master the necessary skills in practice, it is better to continue searching for a better idea. Alternatively, you can try adjacent areas.

When generating ideas for a business, you should take into account the assets accumulated over your life, be it start-up capital, valuable contacts, interesting education and other tangible and intangible elements. At the start, any help, even a very small one, will be useful.

In career guidance courses, they teach the formula “I want - I can - I must,” according to which the applicant correctly sets priorities, comparing external factors and his own skills and desires. The same method, with some modifications, can be used to generate ideas for private businesses.

The “I want - I can - I need” technique has been used for quite a long time, confirming its effectiveness

To apply the formula for finding a startup idea, you need to analyze and compile lists of interests, skills and capabilities, and ultimately come up with the final result.

It is better to record information in a table for clarity. For example, like this:

You can enter any items into the table, even the most ridiculous ones at first glance. Visual design will help to more clearly and holistically present where interests, skills and opportunities will be most fully revealed.

Ultimately, a rather unexpected idea may emerge, as, for example, in the last line of the table: at first glance, it seemed almost impossible to reconcile interests in cooking and books.

Creative approach

Having decided on the industry, it is worth thinking about the feature of the product or service in order to stand out from the competition. Without originality and novelty, a business risks stalling at an early stage.

Don't be shy about accepting help from family or friends. Outside advice can sometimes be very valuable.

Varvara Weber, creative director of the Barbara art studio in Moscow, advises sharing your startup idea with friends and getting their opinion. This will help you look at the situation realistically and evaluate it from a different angle.

Involving other people in thinking about the features of a future business is a very sound idea, since brainstorming is one of the most effective generators of ideas.

It is necessary to come up with something non-standard, but at the same time functional, because the mass consumer will not need originality of thought without practical benefit. How did the companies that almost everyone now knows - Microsoft, Apple and Facebook.

Microsoft, one of the largest international companies in the world, has created:

• Windows operating system;
• tablet computer - Surface;
• Xbox game consoles.

Apple, one of the most recognizable electronics brands, produces such popular products as:

• iPhone mobile phones;
• iPad tablet computers;
• the iPod family of portable media players;
• MacBook laptops;
• smart watch Apple Watch.

Finally, the most popular social network in the world is Facebook, in which new features are constantly appearing, for example:

• O;
• built-in games and applications;
• Facebook Live video streaming feature.

All of the above is far from a complete list of innovative products from these brands; in reality, it is almost endless. The invention of telephones does not belong to Steve Jobs, and social networks do not belong to Mark Zuckerberg. Essentially, Microsoft, Apple and Facebook were able to take existing ideas and do something completely new.

Solving someone else's problem

Particular attention should be paid to the interests and needs of the target audience of the future startup. Sometimes addressing your needs helps a lot. A striking example is the widespread development of delivery services for dinner preparation kits in Moscow. The city, where people are under constant time pressure, gladly accepted the opportunity to cook quickly and tasty when coming home from work.

Another example of successful work with target audience is the author of the “Career Formula” project, Olga Yakimova, who could not find an acceptable career guidance course for her child, so she came up with her own. First, Olga tested the developed program on her daughter and her classmates, and later turned it into a successful and useful business project.

Oleg Karnaukh, founder of the Smart Business project, shares popular techniques for constantly searching for ideas for a startup:

How can you track the needs of your target audience?

To understand the needs of your target audience, you need to think like a consumer. The seller should determine what he would want if he were the buyer.

Target audience - the category of consumers for whom a specific product or specific service is intended

If you can’t put yourself in the buyer’s shoes, you can watch your friends and evaluate what they are interested in, what they want, what they are planning. Observation will help you see things from a different angle and give impetus to development.

Business history is replete with examples of how observing an audience's interests led to a clearly successful idea. Among them are:

• the Periscope app, which allows users to broadcast online from their phone (became popular because it was aimed at the convenience of content creators, unlike other services aimed at viewers);

• Delivery Club and Yandex.Eda, which include menus of all popular restaurants at once;

• Smarter system - a British startup in the field of "Internet of things" combined all the "smart" kitchen appliances into one application: kettle, coffee machine, refrigerator, etc., as many users complained about the need to install a new application for each device.

Thus, you can come up with an ingenious and creative idea, but it will have no value if potential customers are not interested in it. That is why it is important to conduct marketing analysis and calculate risks in advance.

Updating an existing idea

To open a successful private enterprise, you don’t have to make the discovery of the century: sometimes you can repeat someone else’s idea, but do it better. By observing the needs of the target audience, seeing their problems and needs, you can improve the ideas already available on the market.

Both popular and little-known brands have done this repeatedly:

• at one time, the founder of Freestyle Audio, Lance Fried, was inspired by the problem of divers and developed a waterproof MP3 player for them;
• textile manufacturers Sheerly Genius solved the problem of constantly tearing tights by making them from materials used for body armor;
• Claw has redesigned traditional bottle openers to be tiny, just 1.8cm long, making them portable and compact.

Meanwhile, you can offer not only products of the future, but also, on the contrary, stylized products of past eras. For example, the “Ural Craftsman” from the Sverdlovsk region, engaged in imitation of medieval objects, relied on role players, but the enterprise grew well, since ordinary people were also interested in unique stylized objects.

READ FORUMS AND SPECIALIZED ONLINE COMMUNITIES

This is the perfect place to find new ideas that people actually want. At the same time, forums can be very diverse: from specialized public forums for startups to small forums for designers or housewives. In almost any forum you can find a section where you can get ideas.

Just define your target audience for whom you want to work - artists, firefighters, students - absolutely anyone. You can do the math to choose or just pick at random - anything goes here.

Next, identify your audience's needs. On these very forums, topics are often created where forum users discuss problems and questions. You just need to go through them thoroughly - and five or two ideas will appear on their own.

How and why to present your business project

The initial stage of a business requires an injection of funds from outside. Then the idea is formalized into a business presentation, which, if successful, will attract the bank, investors, clients or partners. Regardless of the local goals of the presentation, the main task is to convince recipients that the idea will bring income in the future, including them.

In 2014, on the basis of MSTU. N.E. Bauman conducted a useful master class on preparing a presentation of a business idea in Power Point, the information from which is still relevant today:

You need to understand that the presentation of the project may vary depending on the situation and status of the listeners. If this is a business forum, the presentation should be short, bright and memorable.

American storyteller Julia Melimbrose is confident that success depends equally on both the professionalism of the entrepreneur and his ability to competently present his work

It is necessary to attract investors not with a beautiful story, but with the timing of profitability and ways to minimize risk. When you come to the bank for a loan, you need to show a ready-made business plan with ready-made estimates and payback plans.

What should be the ideal presentation of a business project?

Everyone builds a project presentation based on their own capabilities, ideas and positioning of the idea. We have collected some general, but most significant recommendations from business and presentation experts:

1. First of all, investors are interested in information about potential income and payback, as well as methods for achieving their financial goals.
2. Visualization works best. It is advisable to duplicate all figures with graphs or diagrams.
3. The report should contain a minimum of general information and a maximum of facts. Presentation time is usually limited, so you need to keep it within the allotted few minutes.
4. It is important to speak confidently, since the mood of the speaker is always captured by the listener and significantly affects his impression of the presentation.

The practice of many entrepreneurs shows that it will be much easier to find a business idea if you start from your interests and the needs of the target audience. It is important to look for new uses for your capabilities, to update and complement the modern market of goods and services. The idea needs to be refined, risks taken into account and allies sought. Only in the case of labor-intensive and complex work does an idea have a chance to turn into a successful project and begin to bring significant profits.

SHARE IDEAS

“If you have an apple and a friend has an apple, you exchanged and got one apple each. If you have an idea and a friend has an idea, you exchange and you end up with two ideas each. Exchange ideas – it benefits everyone.” Evgeniy Deineko

Of course, if you have created a new interesting idea, then there is always the fear that it will be stolen, that someone will use it to enrich themselves, and you will be left with nothing. But in reality this happens very rarely. Sharing ideas allows you to hear another person's opinion on it - which can often be very helpful. People who hear about something for the first time often provide valuable comments that the originator of the idea may not have even thought of. In turn, this allows you to improve the product and make it more useful.

Share your ideas - it's simple!

Chase your unicorns

Being impatient, I often find unusual solutions to my problems.
Hacking a system entails absurdly incredible results that contribute to business growth. Don't confuse activity with progress - 99% of the work

The kind of behavior that people engage in consists of trying to make small changes. Instead, you should go chasing unicorns.

The Unicorn Principle leads us to the law that one percent is better than ninety-nine percent combined. That one percent can make unicorns look bad. But when you understand how this principle works, you will stop chasing small changes and focus on larger goals.

I believe that entrepreneurs can create their own unicorns (rather than wait for them to suddenly appear). There is a repeatable sequence of actions here. This may look like trying to score a goal from the other side of the field, which seems ridiculous, but is still doable!

Lesson:

Even minor efforts will yield results. Use the information available to understand your leverage and find that one percent that will bring enormous marketing benefits. With a little math and analysis, you can achieve significant results.

JOIN IDEAS IN A NOTEBOOK

The human brain forgets up to 85% of information 24 hours after receiving it. This means that 85% of the ideas created may remain in the past, without a chance of implementation.

Once you have an idea, don’t put it off – at least write it down in a special notebook. But the written down idea will not go anywhere, and you can return to it at any convenient time.

There is a perfect example in modern business history. All of Richard Branson's top companies were required to carry a notebook with them for their ideas. Later, 10 of the 11 TOPs became millionaires and multimillionaires. Writing down your ideas is helpful.

Lesson 6

The little bird flew south to spend the winter. It was so cold that she froze and fell to the ground in a large field. While she was lying there, a cow walked by and pooped on her. Lying in the cow dung, the bird suddenly realized how warm it was. Cow shit brought her back to life!

The bird suddenly felt so good that it began to sing to express its joy. A cat running past heard the singing and decided to figure out what was going on. Following the source of the sound, the cat found the bird, dug it up and ate it.

Moral of the story:

1. not everyone who shits on you is your enemy.
2. not everyone who gets you out of your shit is your friend.
3. When you feel good and warm, it is better to keep your mouth closed.

Find a problem that hasn't been solved yet

Identifying a problem and finding a way to solve it is a complex but effective method to get a truly unique, sought-after idea. As a rule, in most cases the entrepreneur must already have knowledge in a particular area. This is required when creating an application, a training course for adults or a game for a child. How to come up with your own business to solve a social problem without having special knowledge? We need to look for the reasons for hatred... Everything that annoys a person is a potential source of profit if you find a way to get rid of it, for example, parking, queues, noise on the streets, etc. For most people, the need to wait a long time for a product or overpay is unacceptable, so mediation so thrives in modern society.