How To Identify Market Gaps & Disrupt With Innovative Products
SQI Security Entrepreneur Series 62
Steps To Launching A Disruptive Product In Your Industry
Introduction:
At some point, you might have been interested in the notion of making money online. It’s an appealing concept after all – being able to earn money from the comfort of your own home, or even abroad! So, you type in ‘Make Money Online’ and what do you find? Usually, it’s tips on how to sell eBooks, advice on how to earn money as an affiliate and tips on how to get to the top of Google.
Often by essentially spamming Google until you get there… Most of what you find won’t be terribly ambitious in other words. And in fact, a lot of it isn’t even going to be the kind of work you’re likely to be very proud of, let alone passionate about. But that’s not what making money online has to mean.
Making money online can also mean becoming the next Mark Zuckerberg, Matt Mullenweg or Steve Jobs. The internet provides us with an absolutely incredible tool that is right now changing the world and changing the way we live and work. If the only part you want to play in that is to sell an eBook on losing weight (that’s not factually accurate), then you are preparing yourself for failure.
Worse, you’re preparing yourself for success that’s so modest as to be incredibly dull and frankly depressing. Opportunity is knocking and it’s up to you whether you want to take that opportunity to do something incredible or just to try and spam people. I know what I’d rather do.
But of course, it’s easy to understand why so much of the information out there is geared toward con artists and ‘get rich quick’ schemes (that don’t work). It’s because the idea of creating a truly game changing service or product is highly daunting. It’s because most people have no idea how to go about finding a truly innovative new idea, let alone how to bring that to market.
There are only so many true visionaries in the world. There are only so many Elon Musks out there. This is not something that can be taught. Except… is it? As you’ll learn in this book, it is not possible to force someone to have a good idea. I can’t promise that after reading this book, you are going to have a breakthrough that changes the world for the better and makes you rich in the process.
But what I can provide are some tricks and strategies that you can use in order to increase your chances of coming up with those amazing, game-changing ideas. Read on and you’ll discover how to help yourself think like a truly innovative entrepreneur. And more importantly, you’ll learn how to implement those ideas and actually take action on them. Because there are plenty of ideas in the world, executing said ideas is the challenging part!
Over the course of the following chapters, you will discover:
- How the web is changing business in profound ways and what incredible opportunities this presents.
- How to learn from some of the best and most innovative new business models in recent times.
- How to come up with something completely new and original by encouraging your own brain to work more creatively.
- How to identify if an idea has legs – is this something that you can truly make work?
- How to go about implementing an idea – finding funding, getting the support and help you need, and avoiding the common pitfalls of new entrepreneurs.
- How to utilize the many tools and resources presented by the web in order to build something in half the time.
- How to market a completely new and novel idea in a way that communicates what you’re doing clearly and builds hype.
- How to protect your ideas from intellectual property theft.
- How to scale your business for maximum profit.
- What it feels like to have a truly innovative and highly successful idea.
- And much more!
- Are you ready to start plumbing the depths of your own inventiveness and creativity?
- Are you ready to find out just how truly creative you are?
- And to potentially come up with a single idea that changes the world?
SAS stands for ‘Software As a Business’ and essentially means that you are selling a service via a website, a piece of software or an app. An example of this might be something like Asana. Asana is a project management tool that is used by countless businesses in order to manage their ongoing projects and to collaborate with other contributors on the other side of the world.
Another great example of this is WordPress. WordPress is a website building service that takes the form of a tool. Rather than hiring a professional web development team, a business can simply use WordPress to build a website or blog that is just as professional and just as capable as anything they could have outsourced!
How to Stumble on Your BIG Idea:
Productizing a Service One option is to productize a service and this is a fantastic way to create a SAS.
Perhaps the best example of this is WordPress once again. WordPress is actually the brain child of entrepreneur, Matt Mullenweg and this is the question he asked himself that ultimately led to its creation: how can I productize my web design business? To do this, Matt built a tool that could put him out of a job.
A single tool that would make building a website incredibly simple and that would give users all the features that they needed to build something just as professional as he would have been able to accomplish.
Solving Your Pain Points
Likewise, you don’t necessarily need to go the B2B route or productize a service. You could also create a service or product that would remove a ‘pain point’ that you experience on a daily basis. In business, this is often described as ‘scratching your own itch’. So, ask yourself: what are the things you do on a daily basis that you find time consuming and frustrating? What are the things that you wish you didn’t have to do ever again?
How to Think Like an Entrepreneur – Getting Into a Creative, Paradigm-Shifting Mindset
How to Become More Inventive and Creative
To understand a little more about creativity, it can pay to better understand the neuroscience of what is actually happening in the brain when we have a novel idea. According to science, creativity is what happens when the brain takes two separate ideas and combines them to form one new one. In this way, there is actually no such thing as a truly original thought – rather, it is just an inventive way of connecting two alternative thoughts.
This is where invention comes from and where creativity comes from. It is the same force that – in the wild – would have helped us to understand that a stick is a bit like a finger and so we can use that stick in order to get the apple down from the tree. But why are some people more prone to this kind of novel connecting-the-dots than others? Researchers have looked into what makes a person inventive and creative but more specifically, at what prevents us from having novel ideas. Where does ‘out the box thinking’ come from?
