How to Spot the Next Big Start-up Business Idea
8 Valuable Lessons learned building my start-up
This part of the series is about having an eye for opportunities. You will learn what differentiates successful entrepreneurs from the rest of the crowd and how they take a leap forward! Steve jobs called these people round pegs in the square hole. But do you need to be different from others? If yes, what’s the key to spotting that gold mine others could not?
I am sharing lessons I learned from my time building the PlanMyHealth.com business in India (2011).
How to spot the next big opportunity? and How I got the Idea for my start-up?
Think about our lives ten years ago — How hard it was to rent a car from the comfort of our home? How many restaurants delivered food at home, and how long it took for you to place that order?
If someone told us then that you can book a cab in seconds and access a driver in 5 minutes at your pick-up point, we would probably have thought it’s a joke.
To go deeper, we need to learn what efficiency is? And how can we connect dots between today’s inefficiencies and convert them into the next big idea?
Let’s understand the Oxford dictionary meaning of the word ‘efficiency.’
“the state or quality of being efficient.”
When we find a new process or new method which is notches higher in terms of convenience or comfort, we notice an irreversible change in our choice from the old process/method to the new one.
We usually do not realize when a new business changes our behaviors irreversibly and creates value. Creating value is as good as wealth creation because when you find yourself solving others’ challenges at scale, people out there are willing to pay a premium for that ‘value’ you are adding to their lives.
So let me breakdown my learning into four lessons learned while solving the problem –
Lesson 1: Be Empathetic and Ask the right questions
Ever wondered what makes us identify problems or gaps around us? What’s the one quality you need that can change the way you think about creating businesses?
Empathy — “the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.”
When we can see through the gaps in people’s lives, we can solve them. For example, it’s hard for a blind person to cross the road, and building a technology that can help them do it as an average person does could be a game-changer.
Lesson 2: Remember that an idea is excellent only if a potential customer says so.
But how do you know if your idea would make you wealthy or create the next big ‘Unicorn’?
The way to identify a scalable solution is to eliminate ‘assumptions’ in the ‘problem statement’ and the potential solution you might have considered at this stage if you take a few steps back and ask fundamental questions that probe scalability and the solution’s feasibility, answers to them could potentially help you stay relevant and impactful.
Many people tend to give up on their ideas, thinking that either everyone else is solving the same problem or No one else is solving that problem.
Neither let FOMO tempt you to solve a problem nor let ‘Social Proof’ guide your path; true entrepreneurs go deeper and stay rational and critical in their approach before jumping on a solution.
It’s a good idea to accumulate relevant data from surveys or personal interviews with your audience to have a clear understanding of potential demand and how much they are willing to pay if they got a service to make their lives easier.
Depending on the scale of a problem/gap, you can decide the size of data you would like to base your decisions on.
Usually, 200+ survey responses or 50–100 interviews provide vital insights and validate our assumptions about the problem. These results would also potentially help drive meaningful conversations with your mentors and potential angel investors.
Lesson 3: Build a ‘Core Team.’
Partner with/Hire people who share a shared vision and mission to make your product/solution a reality. It’s also important to bring diversity into the co-founding team that helps bring a fresh perspective to the table.
It also means that the complementary skill set of co-founders is a plus. Being a great leader or innovator has nothing to do with introversion or extroversion, so don’t assume that to build a great enterprise, you need people whose personality traits are similar only to extroverts.
Steve Jobs once said (to Steve Wozniak) ‘I play the orchestra, and you’re a good musician. You sit right there. You’re the best in your row.’”
Lesson 4: The business model should not negatively impact any of the stakeholders of the industry
Fundamentally many ventures strive to organize sectors that lacked innovation or organization. In that process, it’s essential to keep in mind that the entrepreneur’s philosophy should be to add value to the industry ecosystem.
Sometimes Disruption with collaboration is strategically a better idea than a total monopolistic approach.
Lesson 5: Be adaptable to change
I once asked a CEO — “What keeps you up in the night?”
The answer was “Losing relevance!”
Time is the only constant, and everything else changes, be it industries or businesses, or user behaviors. Therefore, companies with futuristic vision and future-proof processes survive and ace the test of time.
Building a business is about learning every single day. One has to be open to accepting the change and willing to adopt a different approach to attacking the problem when necessary. Usually, many companies start with a business model but change over time. For example, did you know that LinkedIn initially was a website that connected entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley?
Lesson 6: Get your hands dirty
An exciting thing about life is that we learn lessons only when we go out there and attempt to do the unthinkable. The most exciting part of my career that positively transformed how I thought about building a business was when I went out of my comfort zone and executed the plan.
The funny thing is that some people even claimed that the idea I worked on was not original, and these were the same people who never even attempted to solve the same problem.
Lesson 7: Only crying baby gets the milk
Ask for help, and you need it. Our egos should not be more significant than our zeal to solve the customers’ problems!
“We are never too big to ask and never too small to make mistakes.”
Lesson 8: Risk it to get the biscuit
Why is it that some people execute the ideas, and others don’t? Why is it that only < 1% of the world’s population is wealthy?
An ability to take risks differentiates an entrepreneur from others. I am not saying risk everything and be paranoid about your ideas. I am just saying, go out there, learn to fail, fail better, and get that biscuit.
I hope you enjoyed reading one! Now go, break a leg!
Want to know what I learned working at a startup?
