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It’s been 10 weeks since I started “Daily things to do as entrepreneur“. I have probably evaluated no less than 30 different ideas. I have followed so many entrepreneurs’ stories, read so many different blogs, even books, all of which continue to inspire me. The more I read, the more I experience, the more I am convinced that there are really no “correct” answers about many facets of starting up. There is no straight answers about if you should follow your passion, or how to find your passion; no one can tell you how to form a vision; there are no straight answer about whether you should start with a 15 years long term vision, or just stumbling upon ideas that stick; there is no right or wrong about if you need and how to find a partner. You should not believe in either outsourcing your development or doing it yourself, etc. etc.

All in all, every situation is different, we are human being and we all have different stories. I have seen plenty of examples, especially thanks to Andrew Warner’s Mixergy interview like this one, that plenty of entrepreneurs following completely opposite routs but end up all very successful in their own ways.

So, I have been thinking: if every entrepreneur has different successful stories, there must be some common denominator among all that contributes to their success. What is it?!

It turns out, all successful entrepreneurs have dug really deep into the market they chose.

You don’t have to be passionate about the market before you dig deep into it.

You don’t need to keep thinking about how to get a partner.

You don’t need to worry about how to implement the idea, just yet.

I have adopted following methods/ideas to help with digging deep and defining what to work on. Everything else will follow.

1. Narrow down to a few markets to enter
Keep a pen/paper or PDA on hand at anytime to jog down worthy ideas when they surface. I have collected ideas this way in the past 10 weeks that provided a good mix of breadth and depth. I then work on narrowing down to ideas that I either personally WANT to do, OR that I am curious to do a bit more digging. It turns out what I want to work on may not necessarily the projects worth working on.

2. Dig Deep:
Once you have narrowed down to a few ideas, it’s time to pay particular attention to the markets that you are already familiar with, even you may not have any interest or passion about.
1) First, you need to research the market size: a very preliminary way to do this is through Google keywords discovery tool. By typing the keywords that are relevant to that market, Google keywords tool will provide you information on global monthly search volume, how competitive these keywords are (to see how many advertisers, or potential competitors are already in the market)
2) Identify and research competitors: Techcrunch is a great place to find out the front runners in the market you are interested. Type in the keywords in Techcrunch.com and it will spit out bunch of blog posts writing about the startups relevant to that market. Once you identified the front runners, read the article, and read MORE the comments. TC blog posts’ comments are the most valuable content because many ambitious entrepreneurs, knowledgeable professional will provide more relevant players in the market.
3) Defining the problems people have and startups are solving: going to the competitors/startups’ website to see what problem they are solving, and how they have been doing. You can easily identify if a company is doing well or not by looking at web traffic level and its growth trend.

3. You don’t have to be passionate about a market
As long as you keep a curious mind and healthy appetite for opportunities, dig deeper on all the markets you have narrowed down to through methods I mentioned in 2. Particularly, I would pay attention to the market I am already familiar with and have been reluctant to dive right in, and pick the top startup/uprising companies to see how they address that market. Read/watch what industry veterans have to say because they have deep “experiences” to the market and they are the most close to the consumers/customers. And learn to think like consumer/customers in that market, try to get into people’s mind, the average people’s mind.

4. Cultivate knowledge, passion will follow
When you have done 3, you will have much better visibility about the consumers’ concerns, hence that market. And market “pain” will surface as a more clear target to you, followed by potential solutions. As problem solvers, we entrepreneurs will get the satisfaction when we find a perfect solution. And we will have incredible sense of achievement, hence happiness from within, that happiness is the source of passion. So, do not worry about it if you already have a passion. Passion follows happiness. Happiness cultivate the passion. Passion does NOT have to be something you LOVE to do in your spare time, it just has to be something you are happy to think about. I am speaking to it from my own personal experiences.

5. Don’t worry those intangible
Let the nature (of business) take control, stop worrying if you have or will find a partner, or resource to do what you want to do. Once passion starts to form and follow you, you will become much more succinct and efficient when communicating that to other people. Always stay connected to people, so when you are truly in need, people will pick up on your clear vision, your assertiveness and your efficiency, and they will follow you. Leadership, partnership, working relationship will form naturally this way. I would go one step further to say: if you find yourself struggling with finding your first partner to take your first step, you are probably working on a solution looking for that market, not a real market problem.

All of the above are what I have been doing, thinking and concluding. They are still evolving, but they are very helpful to my personal struggle. And I hope this can shed some lights to other entrepreneurs as well

Tags: andrew warner, daily things to do as entrepreneur, dig deep, entrepreneur, mixergy

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 2nd, 2010 at 9:48 pm and is filed under Authentic Entrepreneurship. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.