SolveYourProblem
Article Series:
Start
A Home Business
Your
Business Idea: Research and Development
by Jeff Cohen
Market Research
If you think your idea is original, you may be right – but
don’t count on it. Think of as many word combinations relating
to your idea as you can, and then search for all of them. If
you have trouble thinking of what to search for, try to think
like your potential customers – what would they search for
to find you? Chances are that you’ll at least find something
similar to what you’re thinking of doing. If you don’t, then
there are three possibilities: you’re a genius who’s come up
with an original business idea, you’re no good at searching,
or your idea isn’t practical.
However, as much you might think that the best ideas are original,
it may be far better to find other people who are successfully
doing what you want to do. It’s even better if you can take
something that’s tried-and-tested in another country and import
it to your own. If there is nobody else operating in your chosen
market, then it doesn’t necessarily mean that nobody has ever
thought of it or tried – it’s more likely that it just turned
out to be impractical.
Here is another thing to look out for, though: you might find
that your search terms find a lot of web sites willing to sell
you a ‘kit’ to start up that business more easily. These
kits are almost always worthless, but the fact that they exist tells
you that your idea is a common one, and the market may be saturated.
The ideal home business, in my mind, is one where there seems
to be an enthusiastic community of other successful home business
owners, but not to the point where everyone seems to be doing
it, or telling you how to do it.
Once you’ve gone through the preliminary checks, the best
way to research your idea isn’t to keep staring over at other
businesses – it’s to look to your potential customers. Talk
to as many people as you can about your idea, start a little
canvassing, do market research surveys in the street. Do anything
to try and figure out how many potential customers you may
have out there.
Time to Get Specific
When you’re running a home business, you’re not going to be
big right off the bat. You don’t have a huge advertising budget,
and you’re not going to be able to have a lot of customers
and make a small profit from each. The kind of market you require
is called a ‘niche market’ – a set of customers who want something
very specific, and currently aren’t able to get it. It might
seem strange, but the best niches can often seem really obscure.
You might know what industry you want to be in, but exactly
what are you going to be doing, and for who?
Here’s
an exercise that you really need to do. Take your home
business idea and write it down. You are only allowed to use
one side of one sheet of paper for this. The point of this
exercise is to make sure that you know the absolute core of
your idea. It’s all too easy to get bogged down in details
when you start a home business, and you need to make sure you
know exactly what your idea is, in its simplest form.
Once you’ve got the basics down, that’s when you can start
to develop your business idea. The goal here is to
take your core idea and turn it into products, suppliers, customers
and
work. For example, if your idea is to provide web design for
small businesses, then this is where you need to sit down and
figure out what suppliers you’d need (web hosting and merchant
accounts, for example), and what services you’d be providing
for customers ( hourly costs for updating their web site, for
example).
Think of it as inputs and outputs. Imagine that your business
is to design clothing. It starts with the input you don’t control
– what you ‘outsource’, meaning that you pay to order it in
from outside suppliers. For clothes, this would be a sewing
machine, material, thread, and so on. The next input is what
you add yourself. This would probably be the design and manufacturing
of the clothes. The output is the finished product – the clothes,
ready to sell.
# # # # # SolveYourProblem.com : 2007
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