How to Come Up with Great Ideas
Even if you like working for someone else, you have probably had a business idea that you haven’t told to anybody. Chances are, in a few months or years someone will start the business you’ve been dreaming of. That’s when you’ll tell all of your friends, “I had the same idea years ago. I knew it was a great idea!” This has happened to me so many times! But it isn’t possible for me to start a new business every time I have an idea because I wouldn’t have time to work on my current businesses. People like myself have at least one business idea every day. But others struggle to come up with an idea, spending weeks or even months trying to think of great business idea. Why?
The “It’s Been Done Before” Myth
Every time someone comes to me and tells me they have an idea for a business that “has never been done before”, I start to worry. There’s a reason some things have never been done before. Let’s say you want to sell a square car. It has never been done before. That doesn’t mean there’s a market for it. Actually, the fact that it has never been done before leads me to think there’s no market for square cars.
But the real problem is when people give up on business ideas because they have been done already. Don’t do this.
Don’t Look for the “Perfect” Idea
Look at McDonalds. They didn’t invent burgers; they came up with a system for delivering food fast at a low cost. Look at Starbucks. They weren’t the first people to open a coffee shop; they created a great way to enhance the coffee drinking experience. Look at Zappos. They weren’t the first online shoe store, but because of their amazing customer service and policy of free return shipping, they became the largest online shoe store.
These businesses didn’t re-invent the wheel. They found something that could be done better and did it. Don’t look for the “perfect” idea. There are hundreds of ways you can create a better world and make a lot of money doing it.
So, How Do You Come Up with Great Business Ideas?
The answer is this: “Keep your eyes open for things that you want and can’t get, or things you can’t get in a convenient way.” I’ll give you a few examples:
- Sara, a woman I know, moved from Costa Rica to the US five years ago. She was craving Costa Rican food and she couldn’t get it anywhere. She then realized that the Latino population in the US is huge and those people missed the food they could get in their countries but wasn’t available in the US. Sara decided to import Latino foods into the US and sell them online. She does over $2M now.
- A friend of mine used to live in an isolated mountain town the US Postal Service, FedEx and UPS wouldn’t deliver to. They dropped all the packages at a central location in town and people had to drive 15 miles to pick up their mail. Everyone was annoyed with this fact and started saying that they’d be willing to pay a little extra to get the packages delivered to their homes. My friend listened to them and started charging each family $10 a month to pick up their packages and deliver them daily to their homes. He had 200 clients and paid for his college working two hours a day.
- Last week I got a grill that I had to assemble myself. It was a pain in the butt and made me waste four valuable hours that I could have spent helping my clients. I would have loved to pay someone $50 to put it together for me. That store also had beautiful furniture that I wanted to buy too, but there’s no way I’ll spend two entire days assembling all those tables, chairs, beds and closets. What if someone approached this store and offered them this service for their clients? The store would increase their sales, the clients would be happier and this person would have a business.
The bottom line is this: Every time you’re frustrated about something, think about how you can make it better. Once you automate this process, I guarantee that you’ll get at least one great business idea per day.
Zeke Camusio is a serial entrepreneur, online marketing expert, author of Google Rocketship and founder of an Internet Marketing Agency in Portland, OR.
January 19th, 2011 at 8:32 pm
Great post! I’ve found that listening closely to what people are saying and finding a way to provide a service that meets their needs is a great way to develop ideas. Thanks for the post!
January 20th, 2011 at 8:09 pm
Very good post. Love the distinction between inventing and innovating.
January 20th, 2011 at 8:34 pm
Thanks Zeke! I always feel inspired after your posts.
I like what you ended with - thinking about how you can make an idea better!
that is great motivation.
Rachel
January 24th, 2011 at 3:11 pm
Love the message Zeke!
The only reason you should go into a niche or industry is if you think you can do it better.
Why would you go in hoping that just doing “as good” as the other guy would cut it? But yet, that’s precisely the thinking most people open a business with or… even more revealing, if they say they think they can do it better, they show you with their action that “average is good enough”.
And then there’s this factor…
Most business failure comes from getting the market wrong.
Your market is a combination of your targeted customers and the products and services that you’re going to sell to them.
This combination of people who have money and are willing to trade it for products and services that they need… this is a market. Your customer + your product is your market.
You can control who you market to and attract. And you can choose what you market and offer to them. Your niche is critical because it’s the critical element to this equation.
If you get the niche wrong, nothing can help you. If you get it right, it makes everything else easy!!! When you target the right niche, you set yourself up to win beforehand.
I’m glad you’re showing people how to do it right Zeke so people don’t make these mistakes.
January 25th, 2011 at 12:17 pm
You are right that spotting and fulfiling needs is best way to start new business, and that one way to succeed is to do something better than it were done before.
But as inventor, I have problem to persuade people that my inventions are good and would work, just because they think just like You about things that were never been that way before.
They say something like this: “Your ideas are looking so simple that surely anybody could have think of it before. If this is so perfect as You claim, it would surely be on the market already. Therefore, we are sure there must be some hidden problem that make this unusable!”….
I say that surely someone has to be first to think of this in any case, so why it is so unusuall that I could be that person?
Then they say this is “Too good to be true” and suspect some scam sheme from me :-((
I really do not know how to deal with such people.
Unfortunately due to circumstances right now I cannot pay anybody to make the prototype, and those who were interested to invest the money, and great deal of it, ask me to demonstrate that concept work by showing small prototype first.
What I invented is the answer for Global Energy Crisis and would stop and reverse Global Warming Process since with electricity costing 10 Euro per MWh or less it is possible to permanently remove CO2 from air using known process of producing Electrographite and Oxygen, and part of incoming heat would be converted to electricity by Solar part of my WindSolars. What would so cheap electricity mean for prices of all products where electricity is used great deal, I need not explain as prices can be lowered and still bring factory owner more profit than before. My power Stations would have allmost zero Land Footprint because there would be Greenhouses built in, and with enough redundant Solar concentrators Farm can work 24/365 on or off Grid without need for backup of standard electricity generation Power Stations. All electricity produced by wind could be stored as heat in heat storage of Solars so it would be available on demand.
But, I am doing things the way nobody has done before, so surely this is suspicious as it is not tried and proven to work allready.
But this is what Inventions are. all the rest are Innovations, that is, improvements of Inventions that are already in use………
January 26th, 2011 at 2:27 pm
Hi Zeke,
I loved reading this. . . I’ve already created one business from an idea - PrivateSpacers.com - and looking to create another one. Your article was inspiring to me.
Peggy in Memphis
February 2nd, 2011 at 1:20 am
I will have to agree with you that trying to create that perfect product will end you up in major frustration. Instead, develop something that you’ll love, that you think people will love too. Then, simply go ‘ready, fire…then aim’ - as your customers will help you shape your product into their own interpretation of perfection, just ask. Cheers!
February 2nd, 2011 at 7:16 pm
AWESOME article! I truly believe that so many people have good ideas, but with a little “outside the box thinking” they can become GREAT ideas.
I’ve always struggled with taking that first step to turning my idea into a reality. Collaborating with my business partners has been a huge help. http://www.FOURwardThought.com Check us out, we strongly believe that collaboration is a key factor to getting started, as well as, keeping the idea rolling.
August 16th, 2011 at 7:15 am
[...] ‘has never been done before’. Believe it or not, most new small businesses today are not creating something new. Coca Cola has owned the soft drink market for decades now, but, there are still new soft drink [...]
January 29th, 2012 at 7:41 am
Lovely just what I was searching for.
June 6th, 2012 at 2:02 am
I like this blog, looking forward to reading more of your post.