So where is the next million-dollar idea hiding, just waiting to be discovered? The answer: within you. Truly. In fact, you might believe you’ve got a million-dollar idea in your head already. But a great idea alone doesn’t guarantee success: you also need to be able to recognize when a concept has the potential to become something tangible and hit it big. It all comes down to opportunity recognition (there’s that word again).
How do you recognize an opportunity? What exactly does one look like? It has to do with analyzing both the product and the market and seeing if they intersect. What you’re looking for is a product that fulfills (or creates) a need at just the right time, in just the right place. Opportunities are built using a combination of your ideas and entrepreneurial creativity mixed with market need and good situational timing.
Think about your idea as you read the rest of this chapter—or, if you don’t have an idea yet (which is perfectly fine), let it inform your idea generation process—and ask yourself these questions:
- Is my idea realistic? Is it technically and financially feasible?
- Is there a strong need for my potential product?
- Is this a need I passionately want to address?
- Does pursuing this opportunity meet my goals as an entrepreneur?
The truth
There’s an old metaphor about meeting customer needs:.Come up with a product that scratches a customer’s itch, and maybe they’ll buy it. Come up with a product that relieves a customer’s pain, and you’ve got a winner. “Pain,” of course, is a relative term and could describe just about anything-a toothache, a slow computer, a boring job-but the idea behind the metaphor is that it’s the entrepreneur’s responsibility to find out what the customer needs most, then fulfill that need. It goes without saying that if your product isn’t grounded in reality and serves no need at all-doesn’t even scratch an itch-it has no chance. No one buys useless products.