Developing an Idea Into a Business
Whether your entrepreneurial idea came to you in a Eureka moment while daydreaming in the shower, or over a matter of months or years while slaving away at your day job, it’s just an idea unless you make a plan of attack to get the ball rolling. Moving from an idea into an actual business plan can seem quite difficult and fuzzy, but there are actually some concrete techniques you can utilize to speed your progress along.
Decide On Your Ultimate Consumer
One mistake many new entrepreneurs make is shortsightedness. They see the current product or service, and how their idea would result in a superior product. They understand why today’s customer would value their idea. When starting a business, however, it can be difficult to build momentum and a coherent brand if you’re only focusing on getting your product out the door next week.
First, you want to take some time to imagine who your “ultimate consumer” would be. Joseph Lassiter, an entrepreneurial marketing professor at Harvard Business School, says that successful entrepreneurs look at the long-term path of their product or service and imagine their ultimate consumer: "Two or three years from now, this is exactly the customer and exactly the product, and this is exactly why they're going to be compelled to buy.” In an ideal world, after having some time to grow your business, who would be utilizing your product and why?
Working Backwards
Once you’ve set your sights on a particular mainstream market, you’ll create your business plan by working backwards from there. You obviously won’t be able to produce your dream product and attract your ideal consumer overnight. It will be a growing process, and the real pains come in deciding where to start, i.e., which aspects of your product will be vital from the beginning?
Depending on the product, this will certainly vary; perhaps your product’s popular image will need an overhaul; perhaps you’ll need to work on a plan to distinguish your product if you’re entering an already competitive marketplace. As your product develops, you’ll go through continuing iterations of deciding which aspect of the product to develop and focus on, in order to bring it closer to that ideal image you’ve conceived of.
Building Partnerships
Once you have a conception of how you want to target your initial capital and energy, you’ll need to carefully form partnerships with the right consumers and engineers. In entrepreneurship, only allowing those you trust to put their hands on your idea is crucial; in selecting partners for developing and marketing your product, you want to ensure that they understand not only the benefits of your product, but the consumers you’re trying to reach.
You also want to be careful in selecting interesting first customers and adopters for your product. Who can you give your product or service to that will understand and appreciate what you’re doing, despite it being rough around the edges? Selecting advantageous consumer partnerships will help you expand your company’s network and consumer base.
Sources:
Turning High Potential Into Real Reward. (2006) Harvard Business School.