My personal notes for How to Find Profitable Business Ideas

A talk by Pawel Brzeminski from Microconf
#business#startup

Select Your Market Criteria

Here's the example that Pawel used:

  • Business size: Try for 2000-5000 businesses. This is large enough that you can have a viable business but small enough that there aren't going to be entrenched competitors.
  • Affinity: If you don't like the market you're in, you shouldn't enter the market.
  • Ideal markets: They should be niche and small. Why? Because they're underserved.
  • Contactable: Email and phone in the minimum. Twitter and LinkedIn also work.

Contact Your Market

  1. Create an Excel list of businesses.
  2. Send emails and schedule phone calls.
  3. Ask questions to find pain points. Shut up and let them talk.
  4. Ask the "magic wand" question.

The best ideas don't come from you—they come from your customers.

Select the Problem

  • List all of the problems you've encountered.
  • Focus on the most painful, least complex and with the highest value for the customer.
  • Pre-sell the solution to your prospects.

Pre-Sell Your Solution

  1. Schedule a call.
  2. Review the pain.
  3. Present your solution. Tell them how your solution will make their life better.
  4. Make an offer (ask to buy). You can tell them the truth. "I'm looking for three to five people, and once I find those people I'll build the solution."
  5. Rinse and repeat (minimum of three to five people).
  6. Start developing the Product

Why is Pre-Selling Useful?

Normally the development process looks like this:

Problem → Solution → Build → Market → Sell

With pre-sales, you can do this in one thirty-minute conversation:

Problem → Solution → Sell

Building and marketing can take years, and sometimes you give up before finding out if it will work. You can dramatically reduce your risk this way.

Use Conferences to Turbocharge This Process

  • Incredible pace of learning
  • Rapid feedback
  • Early adopters
  • Follow up after the conversation
  • Smaller is better