Alex Pooley’s Blog

You just had a brilliant idea for a new business. You’re psyched and now you can’t sleep.

I’ve been there, I’ve done that… give me a minute and I’ll make it worth your while. Here’s some conclusions I’ve made over the last year while building my software company called Brown Beagle Software.

There’s two sides to business: supply and demand.

… and your idea sits somewhere between supply and demand. In the picture above, your idea is represented by the green circle.

Notice:

• It belongs to the supply set.
• It overlaps to some degree with demand.
• It overlaps partially with the set of transactions.

The picture above is idealistic and naive. Let me show you what the picture actually looks like…

Notice how you can’t see your idea? That’s because you don’t have anything yet.

Fact 1: You need something to sell if you’re going to sell anything.

So before you flame me for coming to such an obvious conclusion take a second and think about all the awesome ideas you’ve taken from start to finish.

OK, so assuming you haven’t left in disgust, here’s fact 2…

Fact 2: Half arsed execution is not good enough.

That green circle is your brilliant idea with a half baked implementation. Notice how you’re offering something that no one wants? Of course, this step is unavoidable. Stick with it.

Executing is the hardest part. Giving up is easy. Giving up means you’re little green circle won’t grow.

Persevere and you’re circle will grow…

Gah!

6 months later you’ve built something awesome… and no one wants it. See how your little circle is growing, but it’s veered off course? It should really overlap a bit with demand and transactions like our very first graph.

This is where a lot of geeks fall over…

Fact 3: Marketing is where it’s at. Build for real people or prepare to fail.

Marketing is about understanding what people want. Ignore all the psycho-babble junk that most people associate with marketing. For the purposes of turning your idea in to a business, marketing is all about finding a group of people who want your product.

This is a hard lesson to learn. It doesn’t matter how great you think your idea is, if no one wants it, well, no one wants it.

It’s capitalism at its finest. Sure, there’s some ugly sides to capitalism, but this side I like.

Fact 4: Entrepreneurs are forced to be generous.

There’s a stigma associated with entrepreneurs. Greedy, selfish, etc. Sure, it’s all about the money, but it has to be about the people first. There’s something beautiful in that, don’t you think?

Notice how we’ve come full circle?

I admit, I need the little spark before I get interested in building something. But after the spark, I strongly encourage you to evaluate your idea from the perspective of someone who would buy it.

From your perspective: “My idea is all about building an awesome game that uses x y z technology.”

From your customers perspective: “I want a game because I like to play games. There’s all these games that I could buy, but they’re not scratching every itch.”

See how when you frame your product from your customers perspective, you see how you fit in to the bigger picture? Now you have competition, market size, possible customers, and all sorts of other juicy business stuff.

Success!

If all goes right you’ll get here. The green circle illustrates that your idea/business is a good fit with the market and you’re making coin.

There’s stacks more I’d like to say but I’ll leave it for another day.

Disclaimer: I’m not a business success and anything I write here could in fact be totally wrong. But, if you like this sort of thing, why not subscribe? :)