How does one come up with a great business idea?

One of the tried and true methods for finding a winning idea boils down to finding a common problem and providing or building a solution for it.

Step 1: Find a specific demographic of people/businesses. (Ex: Accounting Firms in Chicago, Sushi Restaurants in California, Small Advertising Firms in Nebraska).

Step 2: Conduct 20-50-100 short interviews with willing people who fall within that demographic. Ask them a standard set of questions involving their day-to-day operations, their challenges, their roadblock/bottlenecks etc.

Step 3: Ask if they'd be open to you coming back to them a few weeks with some ideas on saving time/money or solving those problems.

Step 4: Find the most common problems, and decide on one, or a small subset of them to tackle. Optimize a solution, then return to those people you've interviewed with a proposed solution.

Step 5: Give them a timeline for when you can have a first demo/MVP (minimum viable product) by. Once you have this, have them commit to 3 months of your service and see how it goes.

Step 6: Prepare the roll-out, and build out full functionality now that you have the money to do it with.

I have three somewhat connected points on that one.

1. Ideas are overrated.
Everyone has ideas. Heck, I believe if we two would sit together for 30min we could produce 5-10 really reasonable ideas for a business. Unfortunately ideas don't do anything. They just sit around and rot. Execution is where the game gets real. How to bring an idea to life? Many services you are using where tried countless times before they succeeded. Bottom line. You can have all the great ideas in the world - what you need is the expertise, grit and angle to play them out to their potential.

2. Timing is everything
Trying to hit a small moving target with one arrow in your quiver. Thats about it. The target is your timing slot. Identify it.

3. How to generate ideas?
I use two active methods (besides reading and contemplating constantly) to generate ideas if I need to:

a. Talk to smart people. Listen. Listen more. Ask smart questions. Connect the dots.

b. Force yourself. Train your idea muscle. I came across that line of thought while following James Altucher. I believe he still sits down every morning and forces himself to write 10 Ideas down. Every morning 10 ideas. That would give you 300 a month. 3600 per year. The quantity alone should ensure that there is something of value for you or others. The trick is that it will be very hard in the beginning. Torturous. But over time easier. You'll get used to it. Its like training a muscle essentially.

Side effect: You will think a lot about ideas and over time get very good at identifying edge cases, bottlenecks etc. So you will learn to answer your initial question all by yourself just by doing that.

Hope that helps!

Being an Entrepreneur, It always cherish me up to find ideas which makes life simpler somewhat. Finding ideas are not so tough, Because it's always comes with what we roam around, the people we see and work with, Idea can be anything that can make life simpler, Idea can be generated by the people who are living around us, what problem they are facing and for that problem which solution you come up with, Is that solutions worth enough for that problem.?

This is what basically ideas come from. If you need more help and details. feel free to make call.!

thanks.

It all starts with what problem can you solve.

The most successful businesses have all identified a problem and created a unique solution that solves this and monetorised this.

Talk to me if you would like to know more.