To sign up for our daily email newsletter, CLICK HERE
You think you have a business idea that is irresistible, a product that customers will buy yes or yes. Have you tested it among your potential clients?
We tell you how to do it and how to extract the necessary information to know if your idea will be successful.
Do you want to see how our entrepreneurs solved this situation? Did you survey potential customers? How did you do the first product validations? As always real cases, with real experiences in our videos.
A good wine needs to mature over time to improve, the same happens with business ideas, only with time and effort do they mature and become a potential source of profit.
When you start to undertake, you must optimize time and not invest all your hours in developing a business idea about a product or service, that you do not know if a client is interested in buying.
A tabletop exercise is an interactive simulation of a real-world event. It enables tabletop exercise organizations to practice and refine their crisis management plan before the actual incident occurs.
All the products and services that are on the market and sold are because:
– They solve a problem.
– They provide a solution to a need.
– They satisfy a passion.
Therefore, the first thing you have to do is fall in love with the problem. Think about what other companies have done: eBay made it easier to buy and sell online, Google made it easy to find information online. What can you do that improves what already exists or is totally new?
Basically, all products that are sold well have one characteristic in common; they are needed by many people to solve certain problems they face. As people start to find alternative solutions, they can buy other similar products. That’s why sales professionals always try to think of ways they can remain the only solution to a particular problem. And in the competition between search engines we know that Google is the champion. The company can provide a search engine with a simple, pleasant interface, with search results that are more complete and targeted than similar search engines.
Specify the problem that your idea solves
To specify the problem, your clients will be the cornerstone on which to support the entire structure of your business idea. Follow the steps below to define it:
1. Ask yourself questions
You will have to start by asking yourself questions like the following:
– What problems do your potential clients have?
– Why?
– How do they deal with these problems?
– What is the origin of the problems?
Analyze the answers and draw conclusions. It is likely that the moment you compare with clients the solutions you have found will change your conclusions.
2. Analyze what type of problem you are trying to solve
In general, there are the following types of problems that you can solve with a business:
– Hidden problem. Your potential clients have a problem, but are not aware of it.
– Passive problem. Customers have a problem, but they are not concerned with the solution.
– Active problem. They have a problem and they have searched for a solution without success.
– Urgent problem. The client has an urgent problem and is looking for a quick solution because the one he has does not work for him.
3. Fall in love with the problem and not with the solution
As an entrepreneur you will tend to focus on developing and knowing your product in depth and you can spend hours talking about how wonderful it is, but you forget that you must fall in love with the problem and, therefore, know the customer who has it in depth. Don’t make the mistake of focusing on the solution.
– Define the solution to your idea
– Define the solution that your idea provides
You’ve probably heard of Airbnb. It is a company that connects homeowners who need an extra income (problem) and tourists who are looking for temporary accommodation and do not want to go to a hotel (problem). Airbnb offers the solution: it connects owners and tourists.
Everyone benefits: Airbnb charges for its service, the owner charges for the rent and the tourist pays what he considers appropriate and stays in the house he wants.
That is the basis of any business: an idea that provides a solution to a problem that people have.
How can I define the solution that my idea provides? As follows:
Start playing: gamestorming
Forget sitting for hours in front of the computer thinking and start playing. Your tools will be: colored markers, post it (fundamental) and a blackboard or a large piece of paper. Write everything you can think of, play games, relate concepts and do not leave anything in the pipeline. Actually gamestorming is based on the concept of brainstorming but is packaged in the theme of a game.
Go out to the street to ask
The game of looking for the solutions that your product provides is effective, but it is useless if you do not ask people who are going to use the product. To do this you can do the following:
Offers free trials. Make a minimum viable product of what you want to sell. The idea is not to spend a lot of money and offer it to your potential clients.
Do personal interviews and take the pulse of the market
Prepare a short and simple questionnaire with key questions such as: would you buy this product or service? What would you change? What price would you pay? It is advisable to do about 100 interviews with potential stakeholders to get a good sample.
Create an online survey
In addition to all the above, you can prepare a small online survey on social networks or by email, to know the opinion of the people. Remember: short, simple and very concise questions, 5 or 6 questions will be enough.
By going through the steps above, you can develop a business idea that actually works to keep your business on track for a long time.
