A lot of research, time and effort has been poured into understanding the nature of discovering opportunities in the marketplace. Forget the traditional lines of research surveys and the like – we’ve narrowed it down to two types of opportunities. Those you stumble across either in the path of doing what you do or knowing what you know and the ones you search for.
Until Tuesday of this week, all my opportunities were looking for large scale problems and then searching for solutions that fit those. In the process of trying to create one of those – I stumbled, trip and bumbled into an opportunity. Largely because a friend said, “I want to do X…” and I said, “That could be really useful. I’m at a roadblock and it could help me do that if we tweaked it here, here and here.” Now I think its an amazing opportunity that accomplish goals that are important to us both and is one of those ideas that everyone gets instantaneously and would pay money for.
And there is the added bonus of having a project that is easy to explain that isn’t a niche solution. I love my niches, but its hard to get anyone outside the niche excited.