Business ideas are a dime a dozen. Make no mistake: creativity, innovation, and unconventional approaches aren’t easy work, but talk to almost anybody; odds are good they’ve had at least one decent business idea in their lifetime. Being an “idea man” doesn’t pay the bills. Having a business does. And that’s what we’re going to talk about today. How to turn business ideas into reality.
Step 1: Build a Prototype
Stop perfecting your idea. Stop making projections. Stop putting together a proposal to pitch to bankers. Start building a prototype. You’ll experience the dirt and grime and surprises that you never planned for. You’ll see the flaws in your idea and you’ll discover the opportunities. You’ll start designing something that people can experience firsthand. You’ll start to understand that your product really can become a reality, and it’ll become that much easier to convince others the same.
You might be in the service industry. You might be thinking of starting a restaurant. Products may not be your forte. That’s not the point. Start building a menu and run a restaurant out of your home. Start going door to door and performing your service out of a briefcase.
Nothing matters more than understanding how your business is going to work firsthand. Investors don’t want to hear about how if you captured only 1 percent of the market your product would make millions of dollars. They want to hear that you’re running a business out of your garage, turning a profit, and all you need is cash in order to scale your business.
Step 2: Start Marketing
The very second you get to profit, you need to start investing in the future of your business. Growth takes marketing. Don’t fall for the lie that great products sell themselves. Only the converse is true: you can’t sell a terrible product. Word of mouth is a force to be reckoned with, but it doesn’t come without marketing.
That doesn’t mean you need to waste your money. Traditional media is overpriced. Nobody uses the phone book. Your customers DVR past the TV commercials.
The future is in targeting. You send the messages to the people who want to hear them. You put yourself in the search results so that they come to you. You buy pay-per-click ads on Google and Facebook where only the consumers who actually have an interest in your product hear the message.
You don’t spend money on people who don’t care about your product. You don’t waste impressions on uninterested eyeballs. You don’t have the resources for that. You target the people who truly care about your business idea and you turn them into customers.
Customers are your lifeblood. Build relationships with them. Embrace your core audience. Take feedback seriously. Customer retention is so much more important than customer acquisition. Marketing is what turns your core customers into your strongest advocates and your best promoters.
Step 3: Rinse and Repeat
You didn’t think business ideas were over did you? A secure future demands growth, and growth doesn’t happen when you sit on your business ideas. You need new ideas and new marketing strategies if you want to stay relevant in a competitive environment. The cycle doesn’t change. You start with an idea, you start with a simple, resource-lite proof of concept, and you turn it into reality.
Are you turning your business ideas into reality?