Day 4: Brainstorm and Validation

Okay, I couldn't find my original brainstorm lists since my laptop is in the shop so I've done up a new one with the things that I remember from my old lists and with a few new things.
Step 1, Business Ideas.xls
Its a simple spreadsheet with 2 worksheets. Each sheet represents a valuable step in the decision process:

Step 1: Brainstorm - this is everything I could think of that I might like to make a business out of. A good way to build this is to keep a peice of paper at your desk or on your fridge, and just add to it as you think of things over a week or so.

Sheet 2: Validation - I take my favorite ideas from the Brainstorm sheet, and put them here to focus my thinking on the market potential of each idea. The first step is to write down the target market. Next comes the hard part: look at each idea, and determine if it is a product driven or market driven.

Let's look at some examples from my list:
A Book on Productivity - product driven or market driven? This is a book I really want to write, and in fact was my favorite idea, but when I look hard at this idea I have to admit it is a product looking for a home, not a solution to a market driven problem. Let's examine this for a minute. I have a target market in mind of young Engineers trying to make the transition from technical to management (IE myself 6 years ago) . The test is to flip this around and see if you get the product from the target market. In this case when I look at the target market, what they really need is management training for Engineers. Maybe a book can be part of this, but my objective must switch from "bring a book to market" to "help young engineers transition to management". As a result of this analysis I changed my pick from a Book on Productivity to Management / Productivity Training. At this point I still hope to create a book from this exercise, but this will definately change its focus, and will change how I research what needs to go into that book. It also opens up the possibility that the book is no longer the focal point of the exercise, and I need to be thinking more about creating and marketing training materials, not just about a book. I'll need to think about that one a little more.

Ideally our brainstorm ideas would be more market based like: "Help for landlocked surfers, divers and sailors ", but I for one tend to start with a specific problem and think up products instead of thinking of markets that need help. Must be the Engineer in me. If you can brainstorm "who would I like to help" first, and then "what is their biggest problem" second, that would definately be better. If you're like me and struggle with that, then its essential that you turn it around after you're done brainstorming and take an honest look at whether or not the market really wants what you are doing.

If I went to my target market and asked what their 3 biggest problems were, would my product address one of them. If not, you don't have the right product.