Prologue
Having always wanted to start a business but having no know-how of the field I always felt incapable of actually developing my own business. In order to help others who may feel the way I do, I am starting a blog right now from the very start of the development of my first business.
I have just generated the idea yesterday and I will write down every step, every pitfall, and every win that this business has in order to demonstrate a concrete set of steps and a guideline for all future entrepreneurs to follow which may allow them to start their own businesses that they may be dreaming of.
Getting into the creative mindset
Generating the idea. While the idea of starting my own business, being my own boss, and hopefully someday becoming financially well-off from the success of my business has always been an enticing dream, I felt that there was no point in dreaming about it if I could not come up with a valid and reasonable business idea. So, for me personally the first step was to generate an idea for a business. I spent most of my college life tinkering with different business ideas.
I started by thinking of businesses that could fill a need the world has and by thinking of businesses that tackle hot topics that I am passionate about. I made a list of things I cared about that I wished would be fixed in the world (i.e. poverty, world hunger, climate change, disease). While these are very vague topics, they gave me the motivation I needed to come up with potential solutions, which could be made into business ideas.
I wrote out a list of multiple ideas that addressed different topics (i.e. a car that collects carbon dioxide instead of releasing it, a large dehumidifier in 3rd world countries to provide free clean water, etc). Although these ideas are rather impractical, the point of the exercise was to help get me into a state of mind that is creating solutions and looking for problems to solve.
Gaining Knowledge
I then started reading lots of books about business, many provided insights, but none were able to truly guide me or show me how to go about starting a business. Finally, I read a book titled, “The $100 startup” by Chris Guillebeau. In it he says, “Whenever something is more complicated than it should be or any time you spot an insufficiency in the market, you can also find a good business idea.” From this key point I started looking for insufficiencies in every organization.
Whenever I meet a new person, I first ask them what they do for a living, and I follow it with, “if you could change anything about the product you work with (or if you could change anything about the organization you work for) what would it be.” This helps me gain lots of perspectives on the varying insufficiencies in every product and business. From this process was born my idea for the business I am currently planning to create.
For protection of my business I am not currently publishing information about the business, however once things start moving and the business becomes more stable I will do a reveal of my growing business on this site and allow any and all to utilize its services early on.
