With more entrepreneurs than ever in the world, it is no better time to start a business than now! However, a business can only be born once a proven idea has been developed.
Finding business ideas to start are often a struggle for many new entrepreneurs. In this article, I will share 5 strategic ways to come up with great business ideas to start:
1. Take Your Problems and Turn Them Into Solutions
On a daily basis, we all come across a problem or two that we typically overlook. However, the easiest way to come up with business ideas is to look for problems you or people you know may be dealing with.
Next time you face a problem, don’t just disregard it. Find a creative solution to that problem and see if many other people are dealing with the same issue. The best business ideas come from personal experiences.
Example – When graduating from high school, my partner & I had big aspirations to attend the best colleges. However, we didn’t know our chances of getting in and getting help from counselors was extremely difficult. We immediately saw this problem and reached out to all our classmates to see if they dealt with the same problem. Before I knew it, my second startup company – StatFuse, was born.
2. Imitate and Improve
There are so many companies and business models that are thriving out there in the world. Find a business model that may have flaws and see what you can do to improve it. Often times, you can read reviews/ratings on companies to see common complaints of customers.
If the problem is big enough, you can imitate their model while improving the things that don’t work so well. This is an easy, but effective way to get a proven concept into market.
Example – Have you heard of CrazyEgg? They revolutionized analytics by improving on Google Analytics greatly. Google analytics tells you how many people come to your website, but nothing about what they do on your site. CrazyEgg solved that problem by showing you exactly what people were clicking on your site to help you increase conversions.
3. Make Something Hard To Get Accessible For Everyone
There are many products that are wanted by many, but affordable or available to a limited number of people. The greatest business ideas are often ones that disrupt an existing market by doing the unthinkable.
In order to so, you need to find highly limited items that interest a specific niche. Find out why it is not easily accessible to most people (usually price) and see if there is a way to make it available to the masses. Not only will you be able to disrupt a market, but you can also build something huge.
Example – Storing files somewhere outside of your computer was a huge pain before DropBox came into the picture. Buying cloud servers was expensive and portable storage devices were just a hassle. DropBox solved that problem by making cloud servers accessible to everyone.
4. Take Something That Works And Use It Elsewhere
Many business models over the years have been imitated and used exactly as is for different industries/markets. Look for successful business models that can work in different niches to solve different problems.
Example – A friend of mine saw that the hookah culture was growing tremendously here in California. He lived in Colorado and quickly noticed that people knew about hookah, but couldn’t dive into the culture without driving hundreds of miles. He quickly launched numerous hookah bars around universities in Colorado and has done extremely well.
5. Jump Into Trends
Often times, the best business ideas are the ones that are built around popular trends or hot markets. You can find out which markets are hot or not through different websites like TechCrunch or VentureBeat.
Example – When PSY’s image and music went viral, my friend capitalized on him immediately. He launched a mobile app for iOs and Android that was a game revolving around PSY that also went viral!
Conclusion
This article shares 5 strategic ways to come up with business ideas that have a higher chance of succeeding. With entrepreneurship and startups, it’s a well known fact that many companies fail.
By creating ideas that have a more natural fit in your industry, you significantly lower your chances of failure. Do you have any other ways you come up with business ideas? Feel free to share below.
