How do you come up with a product idea that the whole world is not already selling? This is an interesting question that I think every entrepreneur asks him or herself regularly. I don’t have the answer for it, but I can tell you something about how to end up with the answer.
Ban TechCrunch
The first step is to stop reading start-up media. Any start up media! That’s over – period. These just promote Groupthink and turns your attention to products and services that everybody is already doing. This is why the world is flooded with instant messaging and photo apps and to-do lists.
Think of it as entrepreneur information detox. You need to get it out of your system. If you absolutely need to read something, read something that nobody else reads. I can recommend Kafka’s short stories, Thomas Tranströmers poems or Mike Tyson’s biography.
If you have special knowledge…
Do you know something that most other people don’t? Have you worked in a niche? If you do then think hard about how to leverage that knowledge for a product or service. Is there some problem that is frequent in this special area you know, preferably a problem that someone would pay to get rid of. If that is the case you have your first lead there.
If for example you work in a cinema you may have noticed that it is a problem to clean chairs quickly enough between showings if somebody spilled something. Maybe the solution is a special coating for the chairs, maybe a cover that can be changed.
A good example of a company that did this is Zendesk | Customer Service Software & Support Ticket System. Zendesk started from the founders’ working with customer support systems, which they found to be too complex and difficult to implement and use.
If you have no special knowledge…
If you don’t have any specialised knowledge, which is often the case if you are fresh out of school or have spent most of your youth playing Fifa, there are several options. Think about stuff that you absolutely wouldn’t like to work with. Stuff that would be really boring, disgusting or socially awkward. It should be something you would lie about it if you were telling about it on a first date.
Think along the lines of condoms for dogs, reading stories for senior citizens, avoiding sewage blockage or code review. Now come up with a product/service that would make this thing easier.
“But why would I do something I don’t want to do?” you may ask. The thing is that this is usually a good indicator of what other people think as well and that is where you have the opportunity.
One of my favourites in this area is the company The Specialists who employ people with autism to do tasks that others find tedious like testing. What is incredibly boring or difficult for other people is something they like to do. Another example is Coloplast who makes products for continence care. Essentially they just make plastic bags, but for a special purpose.
Go datadriven
Another option is to find some way to pick up on a demand that is currently not well served. It could be selling niche stuff on amazon, which can be amazingly lucrative (see this thread on Quora). There are even tools for discovering such opportunities like Jungle Scout (Jungle Scout makes product research on Amazon EASY). But there are also other general SEO tools that can give you the same effect like Moz.
Get out into the world..
Now that you have some vague directions you have to go out into the world to find out how to build a business model around this. This takes research about the users and customers, but also about competitors and suppliers. Strategyzer | Business Model Canvas is a good short hand for figuring out what to think about and where to go.
Lean start up, MVP etc…
I’m not going to go into more detail about this here. A quick search will flood you with quality material on how to build a product from an initial idea and turn it into a success.
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