To start a project, to start anything, you need to have an idea… Ah! but I've always heard that ideas are worthless, what's worth is the execution; But among several ideas, how to identify, how to select the one you are going to start with first? try first? In second place? How to identify among countless ideas those that have the greatest probability of something good happening?
1 – Good ideas are strange.
First step, good ideas tend to be strange at first, they are not well seen right away, for example, the google search engine, it was not the first, nor the second, much less the third, fourth, it was the Thirteenth; however, unlike the other twelve previous ones, which used sites with news to attract more users to their platform, Google was born with a blank page, with a search field and a button, didn't it prove to be different? Well then, the difference was precisely not having the common characteristics of all the others, with the passage of time people began to value this characteristic.
Other examples: renting a property without a guarantor? with a culture in our country that to rent a property you need to have a guarantor... And then a company called Quinto Andar appeared, and precisely it offers property rentals without the need for a guarantor, and becomes the largest digital real estate agency in Brazil. Is it considered normal to go on a trip and stay at someone's house that you don't know, to use their room, their kitchen? And then the idea of AirBnb came up, good ideas, great ideas, in their conception, in their principle, they tend to be strange.
2 – Can it stand out in small markets?
Good ideas, they have capacity, they have the potential to create a monopoly in very small markets, when you start a project, you cannot monopolize large markets, because you are at the beginning, the beginning of the so-called “great ideas” instead of being worrying about large markets, they seek to establish monopolies in specific markets, that is, here I make a difference, here I really dominate. For example, Facebook, Facebook started like this, being a social network created at Harvard for Harvard for the university public, later it was extended to other universities, not yet a university public segment, and it created a monopoly of social networks for universities, to the extent that this market dominated, they delivered to people who were not from universities, from there it expanded;
There's a fantastic book that talks about this, about creating a monopoly, which is the book from zero to one written by the founder of PayPal and today one of the biggest investors in startups in the world.
3 – Is it a growing market?
A lot of people are concerned with the size of the market, in which my idea is inserted, the size of the market of the fund that will be a potential consumer of my project, as important as the size of the market is to identify how much it grows, if you you get a product for the big, huge, but stagnant market, which does not grow, which does not have new consumers, these are more difficult situations to operate, because you will have to differentiate yourself in terms of price, you will have to put many attributes in your solution to be different from the others, that is, better than operating in the gigantic market, is operating in the small market that grows, because a small market grows, there are new customers all the time, there are people wanting to demand your product all the time, and at every stage is conquering the market.
4 – Is the time now?
Another key factor is the “time”, the most difficult thing is to identify the correct time to place a new product on the market, try to ask yourself, why was it too early two years ago? Why is two years too late? Why is the correct team now?
If you are faced with several ideas and want to identify one to start executing, do you have a market? Does this idea have the potential to become a good product or service? Ask these four questions:
Does your idea seem strange?
Can it monopolize a small market? yes or no?
Is it inserted in the growing market?
Is the correct team now? yes or no?
If you answer YES to these four questions, your idea has good market potential and over time it will become a good product, a good service, a good solution.
