If You Build It They Will Come! Part 1
While this is a fantastic line for a Kevin Costner to spout (or hear in a field for that matter) in Field of Dreams it’s not exactly true in life. As a matter of fact this is one of the main reasons a lot of small businesses fail.
Here’s the way it usually goes. You wake up one morning with the most brilliant idea for a business or product/service/book/magazine/whatever in the whole wide world. It’s just amazing nobody every thought of it before. Without a minute to lose you go about the first steps in creating this new masterpiece that you’re sure the world needs.
After weeks or months of hard work you release your new masterpiece to the world and then wait for the sales/orders/inquiries to come flooding in. Then something really strange happens. Nothing. Nothing happens. No sales, the phone doesn’t ring and your inbox is empty.
What went wrong? Why did your product not sell like hotcakes? Where are all the customers?
The simple answer is your developed something that you thought the market wanted but you never checked to see if there was a demand.
If the idea is so brilliant then why somebody hasn’t done it already? Either you’re struck gold or somebody else looked at the idea, did some market research and realized it wasn’t worth pursuing.
There’s also the issue of sometimes finding an established market but developing a product that they don’t need or want. Just because people are searching for budgies online doesn’t mean that you can sell them mail order budgies - an extreme example but valid. People are far more likely to simply buy their pet budgie locally instead.
to be continued