"Eyes Wide Open" ,
entrepreneurship blog – Post 2

As I mentioned in my previous post, we design and develop products.   In our work we come across lots of people with fantastic ideas and entrepreneurs who want to use our services, or just hear our opinion of their idea.   I can say that in about 90% of cases, the idea is a solution to a problem we come across every day.  That’s what happened to me and my partner when we identified a need, a new idea.

And the idea of course … the magic words are WEB 2.0 and the Internet.

We immediately decided to find a solution to the problem, to establish a start-up we called CREA8TIV0 to provide services for industrial designers like ourselves, and hopefully make a few million along the way.  I have to say that at first we had no idea whether the idea was worth anything, or what the whole process would involve.  We were just two naïve beginners ready to gallop into the sunset … without a clue what to look for!
                                                     

I think one of the greatest gifts a person can have is the ability to recognize his or her own faults, and luckily we both have some of this gift.  When the first enthusiasm began to waver a little, we looked at each other and realized we had no idea how to proceed, except for the myspace account we’d opened.   We had to fill in the gaps quickly, and get some understanding of the Internet business world, so after looking around and examining the options, we registered for the course on setting up a startup at ISEMI – the Israel Center for Entrepreneurship.  Looking back, that was one of the most important decisions we made at the start of our venture, and in later posts we’ll tell you about the enormous contribution of this course to our future as entrepreneurs.  

Right from the start we learned that we have to ask ourselves seriously whether or not our idea is a business. This is the most important test, before you even put pen to paper.  You have to examine whether you have a market, ask yourself who are your competitors, can they copy you, what is the cost of your product and its advantage, and lots more questions.

We looked at all these aspects and reached the conclusion – we have a business!!!!  It’s just a pity that a potential market of 10 million Internet users is considered small and our chances of obtaining investment are slight.

More to come…