Sexy & new or dull & boring? - New businesses you can start
A Monday musing ….
.… while some of my friends are at the Detroit Tigers home opener this afternoon (one of them even sent me a photo of the baseball field in a text message – I hate that guy), I was getting into a Monday start-of-the-week groove while still thinking about the calm & quiet Sunday birthday that I just celebrated yesterday. I did a whole lot of nothin’ on my birthday, which is exactly how I’d planned it. Ah, peaceful quiet bliss.
Then it struck me like a sage entrepreneurial lightning bolt (or was it more wafting over me like a calm, warm sea breeze?). Anyway, my birthday wasn’t exciting, in fact some would call it dull. But it was perfect & met a need in my life (the marketplace) with a bull’s eye.
I was reminded of the great wisdom shared by Norm Brodsky on StartupNation Radio and in this article on the 3 criteria for starting up a business:
According to Norm, the first criterion for starting a business is that the business concept needs to be well established.
“At least 100 years old,” says Norm. “You don’t want to spend a lot of money educating people about how to use your business. It’s to your advantage that people know that the business concept exists, how to use it, and where to find it.”
Well, there certainly ain’t nothing sexy about that. Norm talked about how walking through Paris one day he & his wife were attracted to a section of town that sold nothing but cashmere sweaters. Too much competition to start up a cashmere sweater shop of your own? No way, says Norm. That’s exactly where you want to start up. You’ve got customer traffic immediately, now you just need to offer better value than the competition.
Norm’s business is document shredding. New & sexy? Nope. Dull & boring? Yep. He’s bringing in millions.
Starbuck’s sells coffee. New, sexy? Billions.
So, what’s your dull & boring small business idea?
April 10th, 2006 at 7:05 pm
I have a friend that started an envelope machine factory. Not exactly e-mail, is it? Not the internet. Not nanotechnology.
I thought it was pretty boring initially. But, it’s the passion and professionalism that he brings to it that (in my opinion) places him out of the ordinary.
Oh and happy belated birthday Joel!
April 10th, 2006 at 7:05 pm
Happy Birthday Joel,
Yankees in the Bronx tomorrow!!
I have always said that it wasn’t the gold miners who made the $$ during the "Gold Rush" era, it was the folks who sold the shovels and the picks…and of course Levi’s.
A "tried and true" business idea of mine would be stationery, but for dogs…lol.
KB
blogfabulous.com
April 10th, 2006 at 11:47 pm
I like to think that today’s so called "new and sexy" business ideas actually owe their existance on the boring ideas of the past…what is e-mail anyway but a slicker method of old-fashioned correspondence? Isn’t it funny to think that the icon for most e-mail programs is the dumb old envelope?
April 11th, 2006 at 10:40 am
I wrote out the three criteria Norm Brodsky listed on StartupNation and have it near my desk at my day job. Any time I need to be reminded if I’m on the right track I look over at it and get excited all over again. By using appropriate technology we’ll be able to offer more of a superior product at a lower price than the competition. That’s a "triple play" I can get excited about.