My Idea
Once you have a business idea, there are a lot of things you need to think about before you can take it to market. This page is designed to help you think about some of the important aspects about your business. We encourage you to think about these questions carefully as it would not only help you with your idea, but also enable us to better understand and help you with your business.
1. What is you initial market segment?
Who will you sell your product/service to? Who's going to buy it? Think about exactly who you want to use your product and who's likely to want it more and benefit more from it. Your initial market segment is the group of people (identified by certain characeristics such as age, sex, interests, habbits, work patterns ,etc..) who you are going to sell your product/service to. Once you've identified this, try and learn as much as possible about the buying patterns of these types of people
2. Why do they need your product/service so badly?
If you were the customer, why would you need this product/service? Is anyone else selling anything similar? Are you solving anyone's pain? Are you filling a gap in the market? Think about your product/service from a customer's perspective. Would you use it?
3. What is your value proposition to your customers?
This question is about identifying exactly why your customers see value in your product/service. The main way in which you add vaue is by solving some kind of problem or pain someone may have (e.g. umbrellas solve the problem of getting wet). You can also add value in many different ways depending on what you're selling. Sticking with the umbrella example, you may want to make them windproof and multicolored. Both of these would add value, which means you could charge more for them. Find your target market first (Q1), then find ways to add value to that particular market segment.
4. Why is it better than the next best alternative?
In other words, who are your competitors, what are they doing and how is your product/service different from theirs? Do your homework!
5. How are you going to make money?
A great idea is not necessarily a great business idea! This is a really obvious question but a lot of people get so wrapped up in an idea they fail to see how it's going to make money. Think about your revenue streams, is there more than one way to make money from the same thing? Think about your outgoings as well and roughly compare them with your income
6. Who are the key people / activities / resources / partners / you will need to deliver?
What do you need to get the business off the ground? Think about what kind of people you'll need access to, what resources (do you need a manufacturer for example?) and what other activities, events, information, you may need
7. What is your implementation roadmap? How far along this are you?
How are you going to make the business work. What is your plan for getting from the idea to the part where you make millions? Think of the different stages you need to go through and what you need to achieve at each one. For example, at the development stage, you're still developing the idea, thinking about your market and how to add value. You would then research the market and maybe tweak your idea based on results. You would then start to gather all the resources you need (buildings, people, etc...). This is just an example, and is by no means the correct order for every situation. Think about what makes sense in your case and how you're going to get to the end goal.
8. How much money do you need? What are you going to do with it?
This is pretty self explanatory. Basically once you've reached this stage, you should have a very clear idea of what your doing, have a business plan ready or in the works detailing finance and expenditure and stating what you would need to borrow money for. Remember that from an investors point of view, the more of your own money you put in, the more confident he/she would feel about giving you their money!
9. What do you think your next steps shoud be?
From your point of view, where do you stand with your business and what do you think you should do next to progress it forward?
10. Why should we believe you?
We'll leave this one completely up to you...