ecentre Massey

What to do with my business idea and what value do incubators provide?

The idea for this post was an intersection of two recent events:  I had talked to yet another entrepreneur who had spent months thinking about an idea before talking to anyone about it.

And after following a few conversations online about  the value of incubators , I started thinking  that there is a perfect alignment between the two.

This time of the year, after a nice Christmas holiday, people are looking for a change and so many people have business ideas but never  do anything about them.

An idea is just an idea, unless you do something with it.  Everyone has ideas, not all are good but they are there. So if you have an idea, what do you do? Unless you have lots of cash and time to waste, you need to find out whether anyone would actually pay for your great idea or not. The concept of solving a real market problem is simple, but is often overlooked and entrepreneurs will often spend months or even years developing a product without having proven whether they are solving an actual problem for which there are paying customers.

Most likely, others won’t be prepared to pay you for your product/service. But that is my slightly cynical view after spending more than 2 years giving entrepreneurs feedback on their ideas. What seems to be a great idea to you and your friends and family, often does not appeal to others. The only way you can find out, is to ask them.

This is something we stress in our ecentreSprint programme and I know it is a lot harder said than done. Working on my own start up in my spare time, I know exactly how hard it is.

How do you find out what people want if they don’t know what they want? How do you find out whether people see value (and would pay for) the service or product you have in mind without having something to show them or even without telling them what you want to do? The answer to all of these is: It’s tricky. That brings me to the second event which sparked this post. The value incubators such as ecentre provide.

Yes, we introduce you to networks and we offer training and processes, but more importantly we teach you how to actually do market validation. In order to get the information YOU need to build a picture of your ideal customer (we call it “persona”), you need to understand your customer, his/her problems, issues and how they think and feel. You need to ask the right questions and use the right format. You can’t just survey 20 people using surveymonkey and think that you have validated your market.

There is a real hype about having to “validate your market”, everyone talks about lean start up and market validation. Just make sure you understand what it means especially if you are looking at an incubator for help. Make sure, you ask the hard questions like “HOW do I actually do it?”

As the Irish saying goes:  A questioning mind is a mind of knowledge!

(Feel free to question me or to read more about ecentreSprint)

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