Looks Like Rain
More Than an Idea
Whether you spend $2 million or two bucks on an idea, that
doesn't mean you can make it work, or that you will want to
spend the rest of your life with it. Just as you probably
wouldn't get married after the first date, you're going to
have to court your idea for a good period of time and start asking
the crucial getting-to-know-you questions. For Wolf, she began asking herself, "What's the worst
that can happen?" She went through various worst-case
scenarios to see how long her business would last if people simply
weren't buying. She finally deduced she would need to sell 30
CDs per day to stay afloat, "which was probably wrong,"
says Wolf, "but that's what I thought, so I started the
business. I was the one who was going to be working behind the
counter, and I thought I could sell 30 CDs in a day." Today,
Wolf's business sells 3,000 to 4,000 per day, among other
things, like portable stereos and computer games. Thinking about your business--planning, plotting,
daydreaming--can help you avoid problems with it later. "The
hardest thing about inventing is selling and marketing," says
Sol Aisenberg, a physicist and member of Invent Resources, a
Lexington, Massachusetts, group of scientists that develops
prototypes of inventions based on their clients' ideas. Content Continues Below
There are several questions you should ask yourself, Aisenberg
says, after you've come up with an incredible, surefire idea
for a business, product or service: 1. Will it work?
2. Do you own the idea?
3. Is it practical?
4. Is there a need for it? Once you answer those questions, you're one step closer to
starting your dream business. Just don't neglect that step where you assess the idea.
"The dumbest reason to start a business is because you like
the idea," warns Seth Godin. That sounds like strange talk
coming from somebody who wrote Unleashing the Ideavirus (Hyperion), but
what he means is that it's more important to have
entrepreneurial skills than to simply have a clever notion for a
business. "Plenty of entrepreneurs with boring ideas do very
well," says Godin. He's right. An idea is just an idea until you do something
with it. But you have to find that idea first. And it's out
there, perhaps lurking in a dendrite in the back of your mind.
Maybe it will make itself known when you're sitting on the bus,
looking up at the advertising or at the scowling passenger next to
you, and a connection in your brain ignites. The right idea for you exists, and looking for it is as
applicable as Wolf's dating advice. Says Wolf, who met her
husband at age 24 and married him five years later, "You have
to try finding some common interests, and if the relationship works
without it feeling like a lot of work, then it's a signal for
success." | When Good Ideas Go Bad | The Bermuda Triangle. Roswell. Michael
Jackson. Good business ideas gone bad. There are many mysteries out
there, but some think they know the reason for that last one.
Richard Pavelle and his team of scientists invent the ideas brought
to them by companies around the country. Not surprisingly,
seemingly good ideas go bad because they weren't
well-thought-out to begin with, says Pavelle, president of Invent
Resources. "More than 90 percent of the ideas and inventions
listed at the patent office are worthless," he
adds. Invent Resources physicist Sol Aisenberg
says ideas often cost more than an entrepreneur is willing to
invest. And George Freedman, an MIT-trained engineer, blames it on
the lack of a customer base--it may be an interesting idea, but
nobody will buy it. Then there's the possibility that the
idea was good, suggests business author Rick Maurer, who wrote
Why Don't You Want
What I Want? How to Win Support for Your Ideas Without Hard Sell,
Manipulation or Power Plays (Bard Press). If
investors and business partners don't support your idea,
especially if their reasons are vague, "they [may not] like it
at an emotional level--deeper than they'll tell you," says
Maurer. That means you shouldn't push the idea, but "go
into the eye of the hurricane" and work on fixing the real
problems behind the resistance.
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Geoff Williams, a frequent contributor to
Entrepreneur, estimates it took 452 bad dates before meeting his
wife. Contact Sources
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