Two useful methods to determine if your business ideas are successful

For those who have a passion for business or entrepreneurship like myself, we often visualise and see try to potential in many ideas, but the biggest struggle is to decide which to pursue. It is important that we focus on what to invest our money on, as this can increase our chances of success, and it can encourage a sense of belonging and identity; a key requirement in branding. 

By focusing on the right opportunities, we can avoid making the wrong investment in the wrong business venture, especially when there’s uncertainty and fluctuation in the market. There are many methodologies that can be used to brainstorm business ideas, however I would like to share two steps to determine smart venture opportunities, which I have found to be helpful in my own experience. Here as follows:

Are you an adaptor or innovator?  Think about what perspective you’re approaching your business concept. I believe that venture can emerge from adapting and innovating. Adaptors attempt to refine current practices and have a good understanding of reinventing ideas and repurposing technologies. In this sense, anyone can use other ideas for creating a second income for themselves or building their own business.

I have recently watched a show called ‘Self-made’ that depicts the true story of an African American entrepreneur who built a haircare empire. C.J. Walker was an adaptor who used an existing product and commercialised it on a bigger scale. Her adaptability made her the first female self-made millionaire and a perfect example of someone who do not have to be highly innovative to be successful in business.

 Innovators think in problems and solutions from unusual angles. The innovative ideas can be used in different areas or industries. Those ideas require more efforts with heuristic techniques to make that idea possible including brainstorming, talking to individuals that are specialized in different areas, in order to validate your claims, and think about the intellectual property. A good example of innovation is CRISPR-Cas9, a method for genome editing a powerful new technology with many applications in biomedicine and other areas.  

What are the venture core abilities or technological elements? Which applications can you offer? Characterize your business idea based on their functions and properties. John Warrillow emphasizes in this talk and his book that we have to decide on sellable business ideas. In other words, business ideas have to be scalable in order to be valuable.  Scalable business ideas imply that they are teachable, valuable and repeatable (Warrillow, 2010).

One of the toughest lessons I’ve had to learn in my career and business experience, it is that I am not synonymous of what I do for a living. Therefore, from the beginning, you have to think of business ideas that are not dependable on you. That’s to say, teachable ideas that are easy to explain to your employees and your clients can trust in anyone from your business who is in charged (Warrillow, 2010).

At the same time, business ideas should have a value proposition or a clear competitive advantage. More simply, it has to be something that cannot be easily obtained by their competitors. Your business ideas can stand out for being the first in the market, low prices, high quality, convenience amongst many other forms of uniqueness. Furthermore, your venture ideas should be repeatable which refers to products or services that are recurrent customers that repurchase regularly. For instance, essentials consumables, renewable subscriptions such as Netflix, Spotify or contracts such as mobile phone, AfterPay .

Moreover, I would like to add the concept of flexibility and versatility. In this video and their book, Gruber & Tal, (2017) pointed out that products or services should be able to offer different applications and usage in different areas. In the abovementioned example of CRISPR-Cas9 has many applications in biomedical research including the potential to treat human genetic disease such as cancer, HIV, and malaria. It can also apply it to agriculture, for food production and to energy, and creating new biofuels.

In short, these two discussed topics can help you to identify, and come up with smart business ideas to pursue.  

 Feel free to leave me your experience in the comments of how these two questions help you to successfully think in your business ideas.

Works Cited

Gruber, M., & Tal, S. (2017). Where to play: 3 Steps for discovering your most valuable market opportunities. Switzerland: Pearson Education.

Warrillow, J. (2010). Built to sell. Creating a business that can thrive without you . London : Portfolio/ Penguin .