I have to admit.
This first step is the most difficult part of the entrepreneurial journey for me: finding new business ideas.
I know I have the skills to test business ideas and to make them happen if/once validated.
How to test an idea and make it happen if you don’t have one? I needed a way to find new business ideas.
I don’t know how many times I asked myself this question.
So I did what most of us do: I read or watched a lot of content online.
And here’s what I found.
Don’t look for ideas, look for problems.
That’s the most conventional advise.
And you will find the best version of it in Paul Graham’s post on his website.
Paul Graham is one of the founders of the Californian start-up accelerator Y Combinator that helped companies like Airbnb, Dropbox, Stripe or Twitch become what they are today.
In substance: a good business idea is a solution that solves a problem that is so important or painful for some people that they are ready to pay to solve this problem.
If you find that kind of problem, you’ve probably got a new business idea at your fingertips.
Ask yourself “How can I solve this problem?” There is certainly not only one answer.
Example: Airbnb
Airbnb was founded in 2008 to solve the problem of insufficient number of hotel rooms available for travelers in the city of San Francisco.
Copy.
Steve Jobs (again) said “Good artists copy; great artists steal.”
If, like I did, you read Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography, you already know that Apple’s founder and former CEO used Xerox’s lab inventions like the mouse and the graphical user interface to improve and make Apple products a hit.
But there are many examples of copycat startups around.
I have to be honest and admit that Flora Insurance’s concept was inspired by the US based start-up Lemonade. It was of course revised and adapted to the specifications of the Belgian market.
Some entrepreneurs even made copying their trademark. Rocket internet is the most famous example.
This Berlin based start-up incubator has become a specialist in cloning US start-ups that already found Procuct/Market Fit and scale them as fast as possible.
That’s what they did in 2011 when they created Wimdu, an Airbnb clone. They had such a growth that they put Airbnb in front of a dilemma: buy Wimdu or fight them and blitzscale.
9 years laters we all know what Airbnb did and who won the fight.
FYI: The funny part of this chapter is that Steve Jobs eventually stole the introductory quote to Pablo Picasso. 😂
Play the brainstorming game.
Brainstorming is like a game.
And I like to play this game with my customers.
The nice thing is that they know what problem(s) they face. And, most of the time, they already have a first idea of the solution.
What they never think of is how they could leverage the solution they have in mind to transform the cost of implementing it into a profitable business. In other words, multiply their return on investment.
I’ve learned a lot about business models and how they can be unbundled and re-bundled, copied, transformed, etc. to adapt to our brave new digital world and to better match the needs of generations of customers.
It really inspires me. Based on that knowledge, it’s kind of easy for me to challenge the solution(s) customers have already in mind and to help them transform their business model and generate new revenue streams.
I can (and I did) do this exercice for customers in many industries including real estate, insurance, water distribution, …
Listen to your wife/husband.
My spouse is a wonderful source of ideas.
Not that she complaints a lot. 😉
She experienced some health problems that traditional healthcare doesn’t solve.
She looked for an alternative and found that having a better food hygiene could be the solution.
But changing your eating habits is very hard. There’s a long way to achieve success.
By the way, she did.
“How can I lastingly change my eating habits?” is the problem.
And it’s so painful that people are ready to pay for a way that lets them achieve this.
Once the problem was clearly identified, she came up with several ideas, at different scales, that could solution it.
Conclusion
An idea is a solution to a problem.
If you copy an existing business (and you can), make sure that the problem this business tries to solve is real.
Anyway, you need a problem to find a solution/idea.
To find a problem, look at what is preventing you from reaching your goals. Observe people. Talk to people. Be empathetic. Ask questions.
Ideas will naturally emerge.
Want to go further?
If you want to go further on this topic, you can watch this video of Oussama Ammar talking about the difference between looking for ideas and looking for problems.
I also put it here. 👇
Kind regards,
Fabee
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