2 Eureka! Super Idea

Have you found your super idea yet? You might have a hunch about the kind of business you'd like to start, but it doesn't matter too much if you don't. I'm going to give you some insight into how you can come up with some great ideas.

There are all sorts of places you can look to find your killer idea. You might use a skill that you've already taken the time to learn or maybe there's a problem you have come across in your day-to-day life that you reckon you could solve. Perhaps you'll be one of the people who will be able to figure out how to evolve your hobby into a career, so you can make a living from something you love.

Wherever you choose to look for your idea, there are a few factors that will lead to success or failure. The most important question to ask yourself is whether you will be offering something worthwhile, something that people will be willing to pay their hard-earned money for.

Of course, you need to create something that is different to what is already out there and that will capture the imagination of your customers. It doesn't have to be some-thing radically different; maybe you'll offer great customer service in a sector where nobody else does (think of First Direct or Egg in banking), or maybe you'll present something that has been around for ages but in a funky new way. Whatever you do, it has to be something that excites you to your core and that feels authentic to who you are and what you believe in.

It is also important to think about whether or not you will enjoy making that product or providing that service. To get the business started, you're going to have to spend a lot of time on it and you probably won't make much money at the start. It has to be something that you're going to find fun, challenging and exciting to do, regardless of the amount of work involved or how little money you might make.

Coming up with that idea doesn't have to be difficult and the best ideas in the world are usually very simple. You really don't need to reinvent the wheel. I know I certainly haven't.

Finding Inspiration

My idea came about very simply from my love of my gran's jam. I took inspiration from her and ran with it. Your gran might not be as good at cooking as mine, so perhaps you will have to look more widely for inspiration to start your business.

People tell me all the time that they want to start a business but they can't think of an idea. Maybe that's a frustration that you feel too. I always ask them: how much time have you spent trying to come up with an idea? Almost always, their answer is ‘none’. It's as if people have an impression that ideas just pop into your head one day as if by magic, like they do in cartoons.

How many ideas have you had lying in the bath or on a beach? Probably loads and loads. When you take time out from the chaos of day-to-day life to stop and think, even for just a moment, that is when you start to have ideas.

If you were to devote even just a day to coming up with ideas, you would be amazed at what you can come up with when your entire mind is focused on it. Think about the following and try to see the business opportunities in each:

• How could you make day-to-day life better for disabled people?
• How could you encourage people to holiday in East Sussex?
• What would make it simpler for people to grow potatoes at home?
• Is there a service you could create to prevent people running out of toilet paper?
• Could you create a system that makes it easier for employees to claim expenses from their employer and for the employer to pay them?
• How could you make a living out of a passion for tulips?

See how simple it can be? It's not for me to tell you what topics are interesting to you or not, but I can guarantee that there are almost limitless opportunities for each. I don't think you're going to start an internet television show about tulip growing, but someone will!

You'll no doubt be able to come up with hundreds of ideas, some of them awful and some of them good, for whatever topics or themes that interest you. In a way, you have to open yourself up to looking at everything with a critical eye. Try to find flaws in products and services you use every day and come up with ways to make them better.

Do you forget to send birthday cards to loved ones? Or maybe you get annoyed when the milk goes off in your fridge? Or you spend hours flicking through channels trying to find something you want to watch? Does the amount of junk in kids' food make you angry? How about the rubbish they serve as meals in hospitals?

If it's not you, someone will solve all of those problems sooner or later. When you get into it, you discover that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of things that annoy you that you could change.

One of the big barriers that people often put up in their minds is: ‘If it's a good idea, surely it's already been done.’ There is some truth in that, but in reality, if you look at products you use every day, you can soon get into the mindset that almost everything in the world is badly designed or not good value for money and very few companies offer decent customer service.

Look around you at everything in your daily life. How many of the things you buy inspire you? How many things do you buy and think ‘Wow, this is the best pair of shoes I've ever bought’, or ‘This is incredible value for money’, or ‘What great customer service I just had’?

Once you come round to the way of thinking that everything can and should be improved, you realize that the possibilities for new products are limited only by your imagination.

You might be afraid of trying to come up with ideas because you don't consider yourself to be a ‘creave person’. I don't believe in the notion that some people are creative and some people aren't. How many kids like drawing or making things or coming up with imaginative stories? All of them. So you did too! But somewhere along the way, most people get an idea in their heads that they aren't creative, that coming up with ideas isn't for them.

I am often invited to speak in schools and sometimes we set the kids a challenge of coming with their own ideas for inventions. Within 30 minutes, we have a roomful of kids with literally hundreds of ideas for new products. Some of them are pretty wacky, but every now and then they come up with something that might just work.

If you were to be more like a kid and simply take the attitude that no idea is too crazy, that anything is possible, you'd find yourself coming up with ideas all the me.

Be Interested in Everything

I've already mentioned why I think it is important that you spend your time working on ideas that interest and inspire you. Of course, there are some things that will interest you more than anything else and those that are personal to you; for all I care you might find accountancy, termites, databases or cheese interesting and want to come up with an idea that lets you spend all your time working on that.

Having said that, you should always make an effort to take an interest in everything. Go out of your way to learn about topics that you don't know anything about, talk to people you wouldn't normally talk to and go to places you've never thought of going to before.

Ask questions all the time, be curious about where things come from, how much they cost, how they are made. Read women's magazines, The Economist, the Daily Mail, New Scientist, children's books, everything. Watch trashy television, home shopping channels, even documentaries about moles—open yourself up to experiences and viewpoints that you would normally shut yourself off from.

Why on earth would you want to do all this?

Everything in the world is connected to everything else. Ideas don't come to you in isolaon; great ones arrive where you take inspiration from one place and join it up with something you have learned in another.

When you are a child you learn the fastest, come up with the most ideas and have the most fun. Kids ask questions all the time and it is all because they are interested in everything.

Gaps in the Market

Once you have a topic that interests you or maybe a hunch about an idea, you need to learn everything you can about the topic. Become an expert. Read the annual reports and press releases of companies in the field to find out what they are talking about. Find out all about the market by getting your hands on market research reports from companies like Mintel and Datamonitor. They will tell you who your competitors are, which products are the best sellers in the category and what kinds of people are buying them.

It goes without saying that you should ask everyone you can what they think about the topic. If you're trying to come up with a product for people who fish, go to fishing conventions. Get into the mind of the people who you will one day be selling to. Why do they like going fishing? What are the problems they come up against? What tools in their kit do they use the most often?

Soon, you'll get a sense of where the market is heading—what the next big things are in fishing, for instance. You might discover that the market is in decline and very few people are being attracted to it, or maybe it's growing like crazy and people are building successful businesses without even having the best products on the market.

A good way of finding ideas is to look at markets that are dominated by a few big players, who have been around for a long time and haven't innovated much. The jam industry was such a place, where big family companies had being doing the same old thing for generations.

There are all sorts of products that have barely changed in 100 years. Often, without an entrepreneur like you coming into a market like that, innovation would never happen. It can take someone from outside the industry to see what needs to change.

All of the products we buy today were, at one time, state of the art, in fashion or something that people were excited by. Now, because they haven't changed with the times or been improved over the years, there are all sorts of products that we don't love any more. You can find a way of repackaging, redesigning or remarketing them to appeal to the modern consumer.

When you find yourself looking at a market that has been in decline for a long time, ask why. Perhaps people don't buy that product any longer because it is too unhealthy, too expensive, or takes too long to reach them. In a market like that, you have to find a new way of creating or delivering that product, solving the problems you have spotted.

You might be attracted to a market that is growing like crazy. In markets that are growing fast, the companies in them are not well established and so there is an opportunity to disrupt the market by launching something cheaper, faster, healthier or with better features. In this case, you need to be willing to hit the ground running and continually improve and add to your idea, because in a market like that you could be left behind in the blink of an eye. This is especially true in the high-tech world. Think of everything that has been outdated almost as quickly as it became fashionable: MiniDisk players, for instance, were quickly replaced by MP3 players, which were soon blown out of the water by the iPod.

Being Inspired by Other Companies

Almost every day, I come across a new product in the supermarket, online or in a magazine that inspires me. None of them has anything to do with jam, but I have taken ideas and ways of thinking from all of them. I've visited lots of the companies, met their founders and tried to understand what makes companies like Innocent, Feel Good Drinks, Method, Graze, Eat Natural, Walker's Shortbread and dozens of others so special.

There is nothing to stop you from writing to companies that inspire you and asking if you can visit them or even interview the founders. Companies like Innocent even suggest on their packaging that you should visit them in person to find out more about what they do. You could seek out paid or unpaid work for a company you admire, to try to understand how their business works so well.

You can find a company that has reinvented a product, figure out how it was done, and then do the same thing for the kind of product that interests you.

Finding Ideas from Other Countries

I love travelling and visiting places that are off the beaten track, finding quirky little ideas and ways of doing things that are unique to a particular place. Drinking the local tipple, tasting the specialities of that area and finding out what people do for fun.

There are endless lists of products that are popular in some countries but haven't reached others yet. People go on holiday to a country and come home having developed a taste for a particular drink or style of music or design of clothes. What's stopping you from finding an idea that is successful in another country and bringing it to your own? A lot of the time, it is a sure sign that if something is taking off in America, it will soon travel around the world and make it big in most western countries. Think about smoothies and cupcakes, for instance. Sahar Hashemi saw the coffeehouse phenomenon taking off in the US and, when she came back to the UK, started Coffee Republic with her brother and became a huge success from it. What are the things that are taking off in the US or elsewhere in the world now that you think might one day be popular in your country too?

Road Test It

The best way to figure out whether your idea is any good is to ask everyone you can what they think. I come across far too many people who are frightened of telling anyone their ideas, worried that someone might ‘steal’ them.

If you're one of those people, take a moment to ask yourself whether the idea you have is really so simple that anyone could copy it. If it is, maybe you need to work on it a bit so that it is more exciting and individual. Chances are, it is your enthusiasm for it that makes it a good idea and the way you will protect it is by building a great brand around it.

Don't be afraid of telling people your ideas. Share them with the world and, who knows, someone might just be able to help you make them happen.

Get your friends and family involved and, most importantly, involve your potential customers in the adventure that is your start-up business.

Keep It Super Simple

Once you have researched your market extensively and taken on board all of the feedback of your family, friends and potential customers, you can hopefully refine your idea down until it is super simple to explain. You should be so clear in your mind about what makes your idea a winner that you can explain it in one or two sentences. That's what is sometimes referred to as an ‘elevator pitch’, where you can explain to someone really simply why they should support, invest in or buy your idea. If you're not able to explain it in a simple way, you probably aren't clear enough in your own mind about what it is you want to do. And how do you expect anyone else to be clear about your idea if you're not?

The most foolproof test to find out if you have refined your idea enough is to try explaining it to your gran. You should be able to tell her all about it in a language that is free from jargon and with a clear reason for why anyone would spend their money on it.

Sam Walton might have explained his Wal-Mart idea as ‘a general store that a attracts people through its doors by having the lowest prices in town, which means we can buy in bulk, cut costs and offer even lower prices’. Anita Roddick might have described her Body Shop idea as ‘a cosmetics shop that doesn't test its products on animals and campaigns for issues important to us’. Even the biggest ideas in the history of business can be summed up in a sentence.

You need to have some idea of how your product or service is going to be put together. How easy is it going to be to get things up and running, what is your product or service going to cost to produce or provide, and how you will be able to offer it at a price that people will be willing to pay?

You have to be certain that your creation is going to have a wide enough market for you to be able to make a real business out of it. It doesn't have to be a blockbuster, multimillion-unit-selling idea, but you must be sure that there are enough people out there who are longing for your product to make it a viable company.

What Is a Good Idea?

Great ideas solve some kind of problem that lots of people relate to and they usually do it in a really simple way. Of course, there's a difference between a great idea and a great business.

Some of my friends in Germany, Phil, Hubertus and Max, discovered that everyone likes different things in their muesli. So they came up with Mymuesli.com, a site where people can come up with their own combination of fruits, nuts, chocolates and other ingredients to make muesli that is individual to them. It's a really simple concept that has taken off in Germany and elsewhere in Europe, with sales exceeding a million euros.

What makes Mymuesli a great idea is that it has massmarket appeal, it's easy to explain and is something that people find really engaging. It is a lot of fun being able to come up with a breakfast cereal that is completely your own rceation. The business also has pretty good margins and was relatively easy to start off small and scale up over time.

You have to ask whether there is a big enough market for your idea for you to make any real money from it, and long-term money at that. Is yours an idea that can stand the test of time, that won't be obliterated by some small change in the law or the market or people's tastes? Hopefully you can imagine that people will come back again and again to buy your product and will become loyal to your brand.

Be aware that family and friends can say what they think is the right thing, that your idea is fantastic, when sometimes it might need a bit of work. The only way to know for sure is to give it a shot.

You will no doubt have had moments when you see a new product on the market and you say ‘Why didn't I think of that?’ or ‘Why hadn't anyone done that before?’—that's the sign of a good idea. Someone has put thought into creating something and it fits perfectly into the world, it makes perfect sense.

My ‘Eureka’ Moment

When I was about 13, I got a job for a local entrepreneur selling bacon and sausages door to door. It wasn't really a normal job for a teenager, but I thought it was a lot of fun at the time. I had a list of regular customers, whom I visited every week, to deliver them fresh bacon. Over a year or so I had built up a great relationship with them and I was soon selling a lot of bacon every week.

My sales were more than any of the other teenagers who were doing the same job and the boss was very impressed. After a while, he gave me a job training other young people how to sell bacon door to door and he taught me all about how he ran his business.

He was probably the first entrepreneur I had come across and I found his way of life fascinating. Seeing him growing his business and being in control of his lifestyle made me more and more certain that I wanted to start up a business of my own one day.

Around this time, I was visiting my gran and she happened to be cooking a pot of jam when we arrived, in the same way as she had for as long as I could remember. She knew everything about making the best jam and had perfected her recipes over decades. Everyone, especially me, has always loved my gran's jam and she was often cooking it up for family and friends when we visited.

This was when I had my eureka moment. I realized that I could start my own business making jam, using my gran's well-loved secret recipes. I decided that I would sell the jam door to door, just as I had done with bacon and sausages for the past year or so. It was a very simple plan and I could barely contain my excitement—I was finally going to create my own business!