Many people have great ideas, unfortunately only small percentages turn them into successful businesses. If you’re like most people, you had a great idea, never wrote it down, told a couple of co-workers or your spouse, and let the idea fade away without taking any meaningful action to pursue it. Every great business begins as a simple idea and if you are lucky and opportunistic enough, that idea may turn into a successful venture. Don't take your idea for granted, pursue it. Coming up with a good idea isn’t a static process; it involves a lot of trial and error. Developing your ideas into reality is requires a methodical approach. This post is going to give you a step-by-step guide to validate your business idea and potentially turn it into a revenue-generating business.
Here’s a step-by-step process for you to follow:
1. REFINE YOUR BUSINESS IDEA: Before you launch your business you want to do some research on your top business ideas. This is an important step – so don’t skip it! Study your competition by visiting stores or locations where their products are offered. "Analyze the site, customers, traffic patterns, hours of operation, prices, quality of goods and services," suggests Sapp. Research your market identify potential customers. Talk to them and find out if your idea is meeting a real need. It will help you to start out your business, and also to think three to five years ahead. In the process of refining your business idea, you should clearly identify what problem your business idea will solve or which need it will fulfil. Many entrepreneurs make the mistake of going ahead armed with only their basic ideas. Remember your basic idea is just a hypothesis. Your aim is to understand what your competition is doing so you can do it better.
2. SELF CONFIDENCE: Building self-confidence is necessary for you to take charge of your life and make the necessary changes that will ensure greater personal happiness and more success in every aspect of your life. Self-confidence is developed from inside, it’s your power base of energy that you were born with. One method to improve your confidence is to establish objectives. By having a concise vision of what you want your business to become, you will be in an improved position to work toward that goal. Negativity has the ability to reduce your motivation and drag you down. You can’t take action until you believe in yourself enough to handle the consequences of your decisions. Any time you assume the responsibility to give something that had not existed before an opportunity to become a reality – you become accountable for your actions. You must believe in yourself as an entrepreneur before anyone else will take you seriously.
3. BUSINESS PLAN: A business plan is a formal grid map of all of your business goals, and plans on how to achieve them. Once you’ve determined what you will sell, who you will sell it to and what makes you unique, you should summarize everything in a couple of pages. Test your product or service with real customers, make changes, and test it again. Keep doing this until you’re sure there’s a demand for it. Most business plans are written for an audience. The most common audience is investors and lenders. Another audience might be your employees. Make sure you write your plan with your key audience in mind. Your business plan should cover the main points of your business, interest the reader, and show you have fully thought through the opportunity. If things are going well, your plan will help you think about how you can re-invest in your business. Either way, tracking your progress compared to your plan is one of the most powerful things you can do to grow your business.
4. BUILD A BASIC PRODUCT: The next step is usually the most exciting and the most terrifying: the initial prototype or minimum viable product. When you envision the product or service you ultimately want to offer, it probably has a slick design, and a full set of features. Keep that ultimate vision on the back burner for now. Instead, strip the concept down to the bare minimum offering to address the needs of your core customers. Building a prototype is an excellent way to bring your idea to life. It will also help potential investors and creditors have a clearer understanding of your product. This is what most people tend to get wrong. You must first have a thorough understanding of your offering and what makes it unique. Build the basic product as quickly and inexpensively allowing you time, space and finance to refine the added functions to your product over time.
5. TESTING OF YOUR CREATION: You may have a great business idea. You even have a clearly laid-out business and financial plan. This new business of yours cannot possibly fail. But after creating your basic product, it is important to test your product. After the decision to move forward, the idea needs to be tested. You're identifying strengths and weaknesses. You're finding holes, ways to manipulate or take advantage, impossibilities, hurdles too high to clear, any obvious fails, and, also, all the potential benefits and opportunities. With products in market, you can figure out how to match your offerings with customer needs. To do that, test elements like pricing, branding, features, and customer experiences. Measure the results and draw conclusions.
6. GET FEEDBACK: Find people who know the market, the business model, the competitors and predecessors—people who have been there, done that, and can help you understand what works and what doesn't in the real world. Once the initial product or prototype is released, feedback from the first group of users becomes your whole world. Helpful feedback is useful information regarding progress, or lack of progress. It guides everyday work and decisions. Do they like it? Do they hate it? Do they use it? What should change? What works? What has (God forbid) failed? What needs to improve? How can it improve? What's missing? What is redundant? Talk to experts including people who have been associated with the same industry in the past. The feedback process gives you a chance to catch them on the next round.
7. MARKET RESEARCH: One of the most important steps before fully committing to the idea is to do market research. It is most important stage of the lean startup approach is market validation. Once you have gathered sufficient data from your market validation, it’s time to analyze what problem you want to uniquely solve for your customers. It might be that your initial idea was spot on, or more than likely the problem that needs to be solved is a slight variation of your initial idea. Market research will provide you with unbiased opinions of others so you have a good idea of how your product will likely do when it’s available for sale. If there are other businesses competing for your market, think about what will make you different. Can you provide something better than what’s already available? Another great tool available is the business model canvas worksheet, which can help you brainstorm to understand your customer segments and potential value proposition of your idea and business.
8. CONCLUSION: Think positively. Visualise and get in the right mind set. Of course it’s completely natural that there’ll be days when you feel on the brink. Revisit your business plan, and update your product, team, marketing, implementation, and finance strategies. Gather resources you'll need to expand. Having a keen knowledge of the industry, setting realistic expectations, finding the right business partners, prioritizing the right objectives, securing financing, and getting lucky, are all factors that will help you turn your business idea into a successful venture. Your business is a reflection of you so remember to have fun and enjoy the journey because it’s not all about the destination.
Starting and running a successful business can be rewarding and challenging. Success requires focus, discipline and perseverance. However, success will not come over night - it requires a long-term focus and that you remain consistent in challenging environments. Everyone involved in idea development needs to know the steps. Play it safe, and follow these above essential steps to successfully turn your idea into a successful business. There is a lot of hard work ahead. Embrace the challenge. Be the best that you can be.