3 Framework for Startup Ideas
As an entrepreneur, developing a business idea can sometimes be one of the most challenging things you have to do. Disruptive technologies and unmet customer needs are the best ways to identify business opportunities. Still, those possibilities may be too broad for someone stuck in an innovation block. Whether you’re starting a business in retirement or just looking for a way to earn more money, you’ll want to find the right startup growth strategies based on your goals and objectives.
I have collected and organized some of the most useful, time-tested startup frameworks to help entrepreneurs create and grow popular products:
1. Bottom-up & Top-down Framework
Try to put yourself in someone else’s shoes and feel the problems they face.
A bottom-up approach involves founders experiencing a problem and building products or services to solve it. Imagine a problem you face every day for which you would spend a lot of money to fix. After that, talk to others who feel the same way and develop a product or service based on their needs.
A bottom-up approach to startup ideas involves leading an exciting life and being curious. A situation where you are forced to deal with problems — such as at a job, when you start a family, etc. — will put you in the ideal position to come up with ideas.
In a top-down approach, founders identify a new technology or regulation and then systematically navigate the way to what can be uniquely built due to this discovery.
2. Founder-Market Fit Framework
An early-stage startup’s founder-market fit is one of its most valuable assets.
A founder-market fit is one of the unique factors that separates a startup from its competitors and gives it an unfair advantage.
It is often difficult for investors to decide whether there is a market for a startup when there isn’t much data and metrics to go by, so the founders must convince them that there is a market and that they are the ones to create it. Different founding teams and industries have different definitions of founder-market fit. While founders with less work experience may have less tangible’ work experience,’ they may still have subject-matter expertise in other ways.
3. The Boring Job Framework
One method of generating startup ideas other than conducting customer research and narrowing down the problems a customer is facing is to pick something so dull that other people won’t be interested in doing it but that has a large enough problem space that’s difficult to solve. This isn’t going to be anything flashy or exciting to build your name around, but some of the best companies have been built in otherwise mundane fields and have succeeded despite their dull surroundings.
Despite the frameworks you choose, you must keep in mind that the most brilliant ideas are often the ones that sound the worst at first. As a result, this can be a good thing because it means that there will be less competition in the market.
The fact that big companies won’t consider competing against contrarian ideas is an advantage. So, in the end, what is ideal is to find good ideas that appear to be wrong but are, in fact, not all that bad — and then, with your execution, let that drive the business forward.
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