Not all ideas are equal. You’ve come up with an idea that you think is brilliant. You may have several ideas bubbling in your head or staring at you in your notebook. You might have used idea-generation tools and solo brainstormed perhaps 100 ideas.
To make eventual money from your new business ideas for products and services you need to have some process to select the best ones and experiment with them.
It’s always best to let your ideas cool off for a while. Give it a few days or even a week. The ideas that come to us out of the blue or that we generate using idea-generation techniques may seem to be a stroke of genius in the middle of the night. But you need time to evaluate them.
After you ideas have cooled, it’s time to go through them and assess them for potential value. Ideas on their own are of little value unless they are actioned or implemented.
But which one should you choose? How do you go about evaluating them? What criteria or process can you use?
New products and services have to fill a need in the market. It seems so obvious but unless prospective customers will buy your product or service you don’t have a business. You won’t know whether customers will buy your product or service until you have shown it to them and asked them to open their wallets.
A big mistake many prospective or would-be small business owners make is to assume that their brilliant idea will bring customers to them in crowds so deep that they’ll battle to fill orders and have to turn many away. Customers will not beat a path to your door – you have to go find them… and that can take huge sums of money. Such fantasies are dangerous.
A demand needs to exist for your product or service in the market. You can’t create demand despite what all the highly paid marketers claim to keep themselves in their cushy jobs while promoting already established products and services, brands that have been around for decades.
The need, want, desire for your product or service needs to already be there in the hearts and minds of prospective customers.
You’ve got to go find out whether customers will buy your product or service. You need to know whether it meets an existing need or one that they may be vaguely aware of but as yet has been unmet.
To assess your ideas for products and services begin with prospective customers – without them your product or service will be stillborn.
If you are evaluating the potential of your idea and need someone to turn to who has worked in new product development as well as establishing start-up businesses, then quickly take a look here.
