💡 How to find your business idea, hint you wont find it! ⛔️

🗻 Overview

The average person when they start a business have an idea, the build that thing, and then start marketing that thing. That is the risky way to start a business and leads to a struggle down the road when you have to make the dreaded pivot in your product or service because you found out the problem that your solving isn’t what your customers want. I want to go over what I consider to be the dumb way to come up with a business idea but also the most effective at solving your customers problem, hence finding that elusive product market fit faster.

🎬 How to start?

Let’s start by thinking of our ideal customer, or the ideal type of person we enjoy working with since we are going to be spending a lot of time with these people we need to ensure we like them. Some example of niching down our people are…

• Independent Car Insurance Agent

• Lawn Crew Owner who has more than 2 crews but less than 10

• Twitch streamers with between 100-300K subscribers looking to grow

🕺 Find your people!

Now that you have a niche customer persona its time to talk to people. Your going to make a list of 100 potential customers in your space, your going to collect their email, phone, revenue, basically anything you can find. You should time box this tasks to no more than a week. Ideally these potential customers will be in your area or near you but its ok if they are not.

📞 Have a conversation

You now have 100 potential customers to talk with, but you don’t have a product to sell them and that is ok. What your going to do is call these people and tell them your looking to start a XYZ business, this is what ever niche they are in, and you would like to pick their brain about how they became successful. During the course of the conversation push the conversation to what is the hardest part of their day. What is a tasks they wish they could automate, what is a tasks that eats up their time, etc. Makes notes about the hardest things they deal with.

📏 Synthesize the data

After these conversations your going to hopefully notice a theme of problems for your target customer. Your going to hear many of the people you talked to struggle with the same problem, if not then your going to find a new niche audience to interview. This problem that you just found is hopefully your new business idea.

🏎️ Off to the races

Now that you have the idea you just have to build a business around this problem set. You have already validated that its a problem so when you have the solution it should be a much simpler sale to your target customer. It will really just come down to execution at this point.