Generating Business Ideas
One of the hardest challenges for those wishing to start an Internet business is generating ideas. Many Internet entrepreneurs spend more time coming up with an idea than developing the idea after they’ve come up with it. Is there anything you can do to generate an idea more efficiently? I think there are a few things that you can do – and I’ll outline them shortly – but a lot of it comes from identifying your interests as precisely as possible.
Some ideas just come to you, but much of the time I think to myself: “I want to start a new business, what should I do?” and get to thinking harder than a Buddhist Monk. I know what my interests are – business, gaming, and web services – so I start to think about what problems there are in these areas. What do I find frustrating? What are there about my interests that people with similar interests find frustrating? Is there something that’s being done that could be done better? What innovations are there that I can bring to bear on a problem that I’ve identified?
I start by finding a problem that needs solving and then I go from there. For example, a few weeks before I started a forum, I started by looking for Internet entrepreneur or business forums, because I was interested in sharing my knowledge and getting assistance on problems. After spending a few hours on Google looking for a good business forum, I had found only a small handful of decent forums, and really nothing very impressive. I had had discovered a problem to fix.
My hunch was that there were no good Internet business forums, and I did the research needed to test this hypothesis. It stood the test of a few more hours searching Google, so I decided to start my own forum to fill this perceived niche. If I had just been searching Internet business forums to locate one, failed, and given up, then I wouldn’t be an entrepreneur. An entrepreneur always wants to always look at any website critically, wondering: “If I had done this, how could I make it better?” Not finding any good Internet business forums out there, I knew I had found a niche that I could fill better.
OK, I’ve found the problem, the problem stood the test of Google, and the final step was to write a small document on how I could solve the problem better than others. What could my business forum improve on existing models? If you cannot bring any innovation to a current niche then you might as well not overcrowd it. I came up with a large list of things I wanted to do. That list included:
- A clean, clear design. Too many business forums were cluttered.
- No advertising forums. Maybe this would be a valid idea only for the short-term, but in the meantime one could see that advertising forums on business forums were bringing in one-post wonders, leeches, spammers, and worse.
- Clear Guidelines.
- Lots of useful articles.
- Podcasts. We would be the first Internet business forum to bring audio to our discussion forum.
The list was a lot more detailed and orderly, but you get the point. I had generated an idea, because I had found a niche corresponding to my interests and had many plans for innovation. If you have all of these pieces in place, then you’re ready to put together your business.
In sum, always be on the lookout for new ideas by asking yourself about how you could the websites you visit better than they are; stay within your interests, and be constantly open to new possibilities. Coming up with a new idea is nothing you want to force: let it come naturally and things will evolve better in the long run. I hope this article has at least inspired you. If you just remember to look at every website as though it were yours and could be improved in your hands, then you’ll be taking what I consider to be the crucial step.
© Copyright 2006, Spencer Fry.
No replication or republication in any printed or electronic format is permitted without permission from the author. 
Generating Business Ideas 
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