Every entrepreneur starts with an idea. Or a question. Each entrepreneur picks something to build. A problem to solve. An opportunity to seize. An idea to puzzle over during late night ramen suppers and early-morning showers.
But the idea is not step one. Before settling on the idea, entrepreneurs go on a hunt. Some do so proactively, looking for an itch to scratch or a valuable challenge. Others have curious minds continually perceiving opportunities in the background of daily life.
In this section, we’ll explore 10 methods entrepreneurial journalists employ to identify and develop ideas to pursue. Each approach focuses on gathering information and insight about a gap between what is and what could be. Some founders adopt multiple approaches to come at an idea from multiple directions.
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Laying the Groundwork
One approach is to take a journalistic eye and use interviews and data collection to suss out opportunities. Another method focuses on looking inward at your own strengths and capabilities. Each of the 10 approaches in this section has been employed by successful entrepreneurs, but of course none of these methods guarantees success.
Some entrepreneurs consider idea generation and development to be much less important than the execution of the idea you pick. “Ideas are cheap. Execution is what counts,” say veteran entrepreneurs, aware of how easy it can be to write down 20 ideas on a piece of paper. The hard part is converting any one of those lines of text into actual customers generating real revenue.
To create something people will care enough about to use—and maybe even pay for—many entrepreneurs aim to address a source of frustration. People are more likely to buy a painkiller than a lollipop. One is nice to have, the other a necessity.
By focusing your attention on identifying a palpable problem you’re ensuring that if you decide to experiment with a solution, there will likely be people motivated to try that product or service. Customers might also be more apt to forgive your initial product or service’s limitations if it helps address a source of frustration. If it’s just something amusing that whiles away a few spare moments, you’ll have to compete with thousands of other well-liked entertainment and distraction options, from Facebook to Angry Birds.
Two caveats before we delve into identifying problems to solve:
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Given that we’re focused on entrepreneurial journalism, the problems we’re concentrating on here are those that relate to news, information and other forms of media. People may have agonizing toothaches or painfully poor-fitting shoes, but we’ll attend to their pressing information needs and leave those other aches to dentists and shoemakers.
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It’s important to isolate the process of problem identification from solution development. Before we get to experimenting with possible solutions, we have to make sure that we’ve hit upon a problem worth solving, and that we understand the nature of the problem and its nuances. Only then are we in a position to explore possible ways to address it. If we jump toward a solution before we’ve fully grappled with the problem, the product or service features or characteristics we develop may not be well-tuned to people’s actual needs.