Pay Attention to your Business Idea Blind Spots
If you’re running an online business, then chances are you’ll spend a lot of money. You’ll buy software, memberships, courses, more software, software as a service, more software, WordPress themes, Photoshop templates and more software… the list goes on.
When you think of the above things as an investment, the cost of them fades into the background. If you spend $20 on a plugin that increases your conversions by a single percent, then you’re onto a winner. If you spend $50 a month on something that makes you $100 a month, then you should obviously spend it.
However, in doing this, it’s easy to become blind to business spending.
You could be spending a lot more than you should be… and that’s a problem.
If you’re blind to a problem, you’ll be blind to the possible solutions… which is a bigger problem, because coming up with solutions is what entrepreneurship is all about.
Jamie… What Are You Talking About?
I was speaking with one of my offline business buddies recently.
At least, he was an offline business person until recently. He makes the majority of his money through some financial services thing that I don’t really understand. Anyway, he’s recently started a side-project that involves dipping into the online business world waters.
This would all be a cute story and absolutely nothing to do with the topic at hand- except for the fact that he’d been researching some aspect of online business and found a work around for something that I pay quite a lot of money for.
He came up with the idea simply because he was coming into internet business from an entirely new (and, not to be rude, novice) perspective. He came up with this idea because he didn’t know what was out there – or how much it should cost.
Back To The Point: Don’t Be Blind
So, I was talking to said business friend. He pointed out – completely by accident – that I hadn’t been thinking about how I could reduce costs and/or do things better.
This irritated me, because I’ve actually been spending quite a lot of time (and money!) recently upgrading all of my online business stuff. I’ve bought a lot of themes and plugins recently. I’ve upgraded a lot of things that I already own to developer packages so that I can deploy them across all of my websites. (I have a growing collection of websites and so buying single licenses rarely makes sense.)
So, in a time where I should have been hyper-alert to new ideas, I actually missed this key thing that a guy who’d never done online business until last year worked out immediately.
This made me reconsider a lot of things. Not because I’m trying to save money (as I mentioned above, I’ve been investing pretty heavily in new stuff,) but because I was solving problems with money – and somebody else’s solution – rather than finding my own.
Irritatingly, this behaviour is what I’ve been warning against in the various articles I’ve written here and here.
Whenever you feel the need to spend money on a solution, it might be worth spending a few hours seeing if you could create a better solution for yourself.
Your Problem Is Your Spending, The Solution Is Staring You In The Face
The above sections of this article might seem like a rant, but here’s where we get to the good part.
The above process of looking suspiciously back at my business spending made me realise that I was spending more money than I could be on a couple of things.
One item in particular costs a lot of money on a regular basis. I thought that it might be possible to have someone program a one-time solution. So I looked into it.
The bad news was that it wasn’t feasible to turn this product into a one-time fee.
The good news was that I’m 90% sure I could provide a comparative service for a fraction of the price that other companies are providing the service for.
(I’ll probably announce what it is sometime soon… but not today, because I’m building suspense… plus I might be talking rubbish. See the section below for more on this.)
If you’re reading this, you’re possible annoyed at the vague details. The point isn’t that you can undercut hosting companies or compete with massive internet marketers on anything like that. It’s also not some sort of weird confessional about how I’ve found another potential money-making opportunity.
The point is that if you look at your spending habits, particularly business ones, you can see places where you can build products or services that limit that spending. We often miss these opportunities because we see paying for the products/services we use as the solution to the problem as opposed to a solution.
Also, when you follow the process of suspiciously eyeing your spending with a view to usurping the people you pay, you’re almost guaranteed to be on to a winner.
You Are Your First Customer – Viability Testing On The Cheap
The best business idea you can have is one that you know you’ll use personally.
If you read entrepreneurial forums, you’ll know that a big part of why most people fail is that they launch a business with absolutely no idea who will pay for it, or even if people will pay for it at all.
When you build something for your own use, you can guarantee someone will use it. You are your target market and your own first customer. You’re also a reliable beta-tester.
Also, when you develop a product for your own use, you can sink money into the development of it without worrying about whether it’ll be a commercial success.
That’s what I’m going to do with the service I talked about earlier on in the article. If it’s not commercially viable but works, then I’ll have saved myself three figures a month – and eventually four figures a month – depending on how/when my business develops.
Of course, if you’ve got an idea that’ll save your own business hundreds or thousands of dollars a year, then chances are it’ll be commercially viable in the long run. Why not make solving your own problem a beta-testing phase for solving everyone else’s problems too?
Final Thoughts
Wherever you are spending money, you can think of that money-spending as a problem. Not in the sense that you’ve got to convert to a minimalist lifestyle and strip out everything that isn’t entirely necessary, but in the sense that wherever you’re spending money, there’s a problem to be solved.
Spending your money isn’t the only solution.
Chances are, wherever you’re spending money there’s an opportunity to do something better. If you can find that, then you should follow your nose and see how viable that better solution is.
Use yourself as a guinea pig for the new solution. If it doesn’t help, then all you’ve lost is a little time and effort. When it helps you but it’s not a viable solution – or too costly a solution – for anyone else, then you’ve still gained a competitive advantage and a better life. If the solution is viable for you and others, then you’ve gained a great business idea to take forward.