How to choose something you can sell
Starting from passion gives you something nobody needs. Starting from market size gives you a worse version of what three funded companies already sell. There is a third option.
There are two bad ways to choose what to sell, and both of them feel responsible at the time.
The first is to start from passion. Do what you love and the money follows. Sometimes it does. More often you end up with something you enjoy making and nobody needs, and you spend a year trying to convince the world it is wrong. The world does not lose that argument.
The second is to start from market size. Find the biggest opportunity and go there. This produces people with no particular advantage selling a worse version of what three funded companies already sell. Being in a big market is only useful if you have a reason to win inside it.
Start from the overlap instead
Write three lists. Not in your head. On paper, or in a file you will still have next week.
- Things you can do that most people around you cannot. Include boring ones. Especially include boring ones.
- Things people have asked you for help with in the last two years. Actual requests, with names attached.
- Groups of people you understand well enough to know what annoys them. A job you used to do, a hobby, an industry you married into.
Now look for a line that touches all three. Something you can do, that somebody has already asked you for, for a group whose problems you can describe without guessing. That line is your first offer. It will not be exciting. First offers rarely are.
What this looks like filled in
An example, so the shape is clear. Somebody who spent six years in hospitality operations writes: can build rotas and cost a menu; has been asked three times by former colleagues to sort out their stock ordering; understands independent restaurant owners, including that they do not read long emails and make decisions on a Tuesday afternoon.
The overlap is not glamorous: setting up stock ordering for independent restaurants. It also has every property you want. The buyer is nameable, the problem recurs weekly, the person asking has already asked unprompted, and almost nobody with a marketing budget is interested in a market that small.
Notice what the example does not contain: an idea nobody has had before. Almost no first business is a new idea. It is a known problem solved for a specific group by somebody who understands them, which is a much lower bar and a much better bet.
Three tests before you commit
- Can you describe the buyer in one line, specifically enough that you could name five of them? 'Small businesses' fails. 'Dental practices with more than one location' passes.
- Does the problem cost them money, time or embarrassment, right now, on a schedule? Problems that hurt once a year do not get budget.
- Can you deliver a first version in under two weeks? If not, pick a smaller slice. You are buying information, and information you get in two weeks is worth more than information you get in six months.
There is a fourth test that matters as much and is easier to answer: can you reach them? A perfect buyer you have no route to is a worse starting point than a decent buyer who is in a group you already belong to. Access is an asset, and at the beginning it is often the only one you have.
If nothing overlaps
Sometimes the three lists produce no line that touches all of them. That is useful rather than disqualifying, and it usually means one of two things.
- The skills list is written too grandly. People discount what they are good at because it feels easy to them. Write it again, including things you would not call a skill: being organised, explaining things clearly, knowing a particular piece of software properly.
- The groups list is thin because you have not thought about where you already have standing. Former employers, former colleagues, the parents at the same school, a hobby forum you have posted in for years. Standing in a small group beats access to a large one.
If after rewriting both lists there is still nothing, pick from the second list alone: whatever people have actually asked you for, even once. A request is evidence, and evidence beats a tidy framework.
The thing you are allowed to change later
Almost everything. The price, the scope, the name, the exact service, the kind of client. What you should not change every week is the group of people you are talking to, because every switch throws away the only thing that compounds: understanding them better than the next person does.
Pick a group and stay with them for at least a few months, even while the offer moves around. Most people do the opposite. They keep the offer and keep changing who it is for, then wonder why nothing improves.
A practical way to hold yourself to this: write the group at the top of a page and date it. When you catch yourself describing a different buyer three weeks later, you will see it in writing rather than discovering it a year on, having learned a little about six markets and a lot about none.
Work to do
- Write the three lists. Give yourself twenty minutes and do not edit while writing.
- Circle one line that touches all three lists, and run it through the three tests above. If it fails a test, pick the next one.
- Write your buyer in one line, specifically enough that you could name five real examples. Then name five real examples.
- Write down how you would reach those five. If the honest answer is that you could not, that is the problem to solve before the offer.