As an entrepreneur, or as someone who could become an entrepreneur, you probably come up with many business ideas and you already have a list of business ideas.
Today, who doesn’t have business ideas? It seems that everybody has some ideas for something. But, how many of these ideas are implemented into practice? How many of them are transformed into real companies? And, how many of those companies are successful companies? These are important questions you need to take into consideration before everything else.
At least, the ideas are the easiest part of an entrepreneurial process.
They are good while you make proper records, whether in your business idea’s book or in some notebook in paper or electronic form as Evernote.
In such a way, you will at least ensure that nothing will be forgotten, and someday you will come to turn that idea into concrete action steps to start a new business or to expand the activities of an existing business.
Again, the word someday will not guarantee that you will become an entrepreneur, nor that the ideas will be implemented.
Typically, an entrepreneur will make research and analysis to compare each of the business ideas with another. Based on that analysis he will decide which one will be used for his startup one. Although this process can be implemented differently I would like to cover the simplest possible way to choose between ideas.
The ways in which you can choose or select a business idea that will be worth starting can generally be grouped into a simple and complex one.
What does it mean a simple way to choose an idea for starting a business?
First, this method assumes that you have more than one business idea. Second, you take a business idea and compare it with others randomly. In that comparison, one of them will be better than another, so that one will fall. Then keep the winning one and take another from the list to compare again. One of them will be the winner. The process continues until you finally come to only one idea as an”absolute winner.”
The complex way is a more systematic way of ranking and choosing one of the several ideas from your list of business ideas through a view of different influential factors that can be important for you or your business success. In short, the process will look like this:
- Make a list of factors that will be valued. For example, as important factors for your business success can be personal satisfaction, market size, monetization opportunities, risk of failure, efforts needed to implement it, implementation time …
- Add weight to each factor that will determine the importance of the factor in the valuation process. For example, if personal satisfaction is something very important for you, it will have greater weight compared with other factors that you will use.
- Assess each idea based on each of the factors that you have defined previously. For example, you can use a score of 1 to 5.
- Multiply each weight of the factors with the score that you give for each idea based on an appropriate factor. In this way, each of your ideas will get a proper assessment of the appropriate factor.
- Collect the individual scores of the factors for each idea. This will be a final score for each of your ideas.
The idea with the largest score is the idea that you should choose to start a business.
