Getting a good idea for your future business

Getting a good idea for your future business is arguably the single most important step in its success. Depending on implementation, a good idea can beget both successful or unsuccessful businesses, but a bad egg never makes a good chicken. All the flaws in your idea will get amplified as times passes by and entropy takes its toll. You want the core idea of your business to be resilient to bad luck.

Thus, it is urgent not to hurry. Take your time and think hard and long about your business project!

Define the constraints (lack of knowledge, of time, of money, of resources) that will impose boundaries on your vision. Define what your business idea is NOT about.

Everybody has ideas. There is no lack of them in the world. Most of them are blurry. What lacks is the kind of ideas that has been hardened, refined and expanded with great care until they show a

clear path to success. Test your idea around your trusted peers. Has the business model you envision already proven its worth?

There are other neighbouring concepts you might find useful. What would be the mission of your company or enterprise? What would it contribute to society? Write an actual list of all the stakeholders (the customers, suppliers, employees, stockholders, governement, neighbourhood, fellow citizens, etc.) that would benefit from your business and explain how (write their “win conditions“, that is a result of your business activity that would be satisfactory to that stakeholder). Conversely, list the entities, if any, that might suffer from your business and how.

No business is too small not to be worth using your brain before you commit to it. That is why you need to ask yourself questions about how your knowledge, common sense, and other intellectual characteristics are up to the task, and take steps to improve what can be improved. Remember, this is the time for thinking, not action (that will come later and you will not have the time to think for long, by then)! If there is a book on the topic your business revolves around, make sure you read it. Talk with knowledgeable people.

When you apply the kind of proactive, meticulous thinking this article is about, the end result is a different idea from the one that coalesced into existence from a slow, passive realisation of a potential for business. Your idea is now more grounded into reality. Be serious about it before you commit work, time, money, your resources and those of others!