3 minute read

No entrepreneur starts off with the idea that their market is non-existing. Usually it’s the other way around. You think your idea has a vast market. That it will reach the millions in MRR needed to fulfil your dream of achieving generational wealth. It’s only natural. No investor would like to hear any plans shorter than shooting for the moon.

But how you’ll achieve that market dominance is often a plan for tomorrow you, not today you.

As you probably know, the best ideas are the ones that hold water even after a tough critical review. What you address today will not cause headaches tomorrow.

We’ve put together the first 5 questions we ask any aspiring new (or seasoned) entrepreneur ready to dig their heads into a new business:

1. Who’s your initial community?

It might not seem like you need to talk to people before getting to work on your idea. After all, you’ve probably done a lot of studying and know what people want.
That’s a piece of reasoning everyone falls prey to. Especially if you think you know your market in depth. The more confidence in your skills you have, the less you are likely to think you need to identity a community for your business idea. But that’s a classic pitfall.

Identifying your initial community leads you to your first potential customers. Those that are ready to buy into your business from day 1. You don’t need to find community after you have a product. You need to find it before anything else.

2. What problem are you solving for them?

Next comes the next difficult question – what problem are you solving? You need to have this written down, articulated, researched and validated. If there’s no problem solved, there’s no business.

The main difficulty is identifying what a problem is. There are some problems that aren’t as obvious as ‘getting to work faster’ or ‘finding cheaper deals’. For instance, what problem does Facebook solve?

Find the answer to that and you’ve made the first BIG step to achieving early stage success.

3. Have you talked to anyone in that community yet? If no, why not?

Next in line comes another assumption – that if you know them and know their problems, you’ve got everything you need. But you’ve never tried to sell it to anyone.

This is the hardest part of all. Making people understand. You’ll get a lot of misinterpretation. But in the end, your idea will be foul-proof. And you’ll have known how to sell it better.

4. Is that community big enough to sustain your business model?

This is another important metric that you need to be realistic about. You know a core audience that you’re sure will use your product.

Then there’s a wider audience that you think might use your product. A good exercise is to erase all those that ‘might’.

Stick to your core audience, build for them and use them for your metrics. At first, ignore everyone else. If your product will be good for the core audience, it will be good for everybody else. And you won’t be stuck in the awkward situation that you over-estimated your market size and addressed more than you can handle.

5. How would you answer if someone hearing your idea said ‘so what’?

The final one is a good exercise. Many people won’t understand your idea. Those people might later be investors or clients. Prepare yourself for that.

You might build a very useful product. But sell it at the wrong angle. You’ve nailed everything, but the positioning. That makes or breaks businesses. Make sure that you find the right angle by trying to answer every ‘so what’ so that you can find the best angle. The one that people buy into.

That’s it! Thanks for reading!