Pep Talk for an Entrepreneur Wannabe

“For every brilliant (or not so brilliant) idea you thought of, there are probably a thousand people who think of it as well, a couple hundred would work on the idea and ten of them would complete it, and only very few will nail it correctly with success”

I known of the above fact for quite a while, but I would only truly felt it whenever I work on the idea itself. When the idea first appear on my mind, everything is almost perfect with plenty of potential. The idea is brilliant and unique (as usual), the competition is weak or not existence and it seems viable with adequate market demand. As I dig deeper and start working on the idea, I would find stronger competitions and challenges which would make me doubt my own venture. Perhaps the competitions are not really strong, but they did quite a good job and still get unnoticed by the general public (me). It makes me wonder how good I have to be in order to succeed. What does it takes?

I guess it really takes in a lot of factor for the idea to flourish into a commercially viable product. What do I need to have?

• A Good Idea
• Skill and Effort to develop it
• Understand the Market Demand
• Understand why the competition fail
• Business Plan (How to make money out of it?)
• Marketing Plan (How to get people to know about it and buy it?)

I am more of a software developer than a business man, though I am trying to be more of a business man. I would tend to fall into the trap of developing a very technically outstanding product, rather than building a good product which everyone would like to use. I need to plan and put more emphasis on my product and marketing strategy rather than technicality if I ever hope of any chance of success.

I need to answer the following question:

• What do I have to offer? Product Features? (Idea)
• Why people would want to use it? (Market Demand)
• What advantage I have over my competition? Am I a clone? (Strategic Advantage)
• How to make it simple and effective? (Usability)
• How do I let people know about it? How do I cross the Chasm? (Marketing)
• What market am I targeting? (Market Segmentation)
• How do I become a market leader in my own market segment? (Product Leadership)
• How do I make money out of it? (Business)
• How do I break the Chicken and Egg cycle (Million Dollar Question)
• How determined am I to succeed? (Confident & Perseverance)

There is no free lunch in this world. For everything I desire, there is a price to pay for. Once I make up my mind, thou shall not regret nor give up (no matter how difficult or doubtful it has became). I shall regret if I didn’t see it though until the end. May I have the strength, wisdom and perseverance :)

“Don’t start a business if you can’t explain what pain it solves, for whom, and why your product will eliminate this pain, and how the customer will pay to solve this pain. The other day I went to a presentation of six high tech startups and not one of them had a clear idea for what pain they were proposing to solve.” Joel's Forward in Micro-ISV: From Vision To Reality (Need to get this book).

I need to solve a pain.