"A smack on the face", entrepreneurship blog – Post 3

One morning we both got up, my business partner and myself, with a brilliant idea for an information and networking service for industrial designers on the Internet.  We were really high on the idea, but like they taught us at the course for startups at ISEMI, we knew we had to see if there was a need for our idea.
We asked around among professional colleagues and found that they really had a strong need for this kind of service and it would help them enormously in their work.  Now we were really excited, and we went back to the School for Entrepreneurs to sit with our tutors and show them what we’d found out.  The best way of describing what happened at the first meeting is that we got a sharp (metaphorical) smack in the face.  And that’s when our love affair with the business establishment started (and is still going strong…).  We were determined to build a strong foundation for our business venture.  We looked again at our idea from all angles.  Was there really a need for it, and more precisely, was there a market for it?
I’ve already said that the tendency for new entrepreneurs who get an idea relating to their professional fields (lots of ideas come up when we’re dealing with personal matters) is to apply their personal experience or maximum the experience of their surroundings to the question of need.  It’s easy to be swayed by your mother’s enthusiasm – she always thought you were amazing.  It’s tempting to rely on the opinions of friends who know how good you are professionally, so you get ten friends from work, two from your studies, one proud mum and suddenly, there’s your market!  Well, it doesn’t quite work like that.
It’s easy for the new entrepreneur to take refuge in the world of technology and professional concepts relating to his specific niche. To rely on experience and personal need as a way of avoiding the important initial questions:  “Is there a target market that’s big enough to justify developing this idea into a business with a profitable business model that others will want to invest in?”  Without a target market, there’s no business, no model and no venture.  It’s hard to accept this fact because in our heads we believe so strongly in our idea and we’re so emotionally bound up in it.
So our first “smack in the face” was this message, and it came across loud and clear.  First of all we cut ourselves off from the concepts and definitions of our professional world and tuned into some basics of the business world.  Before you get carried away by your idea, you have to define your market.  There are some markets where a few big customers are enough to build up a business worth millions.  On the other hand, sometimes you might identify a potential market of 10 million people but a potential investor (who knows the market) won’t bat an eyelid.
As soon as you start defining your venture, you’ll have to spend days and nights glued to the Internet and any other source of information (the target population itself, customers, suppliers, libraries, academic sources, experts in the field, consultants, financial people, service providers and so on) and examine the market from every angle.
Helped by the short, sharp “smack in the face” we understood that our background in design did not make us Internet experts.  So for the next few months we talked for hours over Skype and sent each other information about the Internet – trends, developments, success and failures, rules of thumb, our target market, definition of our target users.
To say that this research stage is short or simple would really be a distortion.  It’s a dynamic, ongoing process and we know it will continue even when our company is up and running.  We’re always reviewing, learning more about the market and our customers, and that’s essential.   It’s only this stubborn research has that brought us to the stage where we can construct an outline plan that can be shown to advisers.  Then we’ll have to refine it, learn more about our potential customers and their needs.  There’s a lot of trial and error, reflection and change in this continuing love affair.

** One important thing you must never forget, is that in the end you’ll never learn about the real needs of your customers unless you get out there and meet them!!!**

At the beginning, when we found out that our initial market amounted to only about 10 million potential customers, which is negligible in our Internet model, our faces fell and we were sure this was the end of our venture.
Now, after about a year of more dedicated market research, studying all the factors and improving our presentations over 100 times to show the importance of business creativity, being flexible but determined in developing our business model, we are overjoyed to announce that we have a potential market nearly 20 times bigger than the one we first thought of.  Who knows, may next year it will double itself…

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