Well this is a bit of a controversial idea but I’m a firm believer that original products and ideas for original products can be an accident waiting to happen… let me explain… actually it’s not really the idea for an original product that’s dangerous, it’s the fact that very often an established market does not exist for your product.

If you’re a small business start-up and you’re not planning on being the next Facebook (see my previous post for why you shouldn’t be trying to be the next Facebook) then you absolutely must have an existing market of people you can sell your product to. 

If you’ve created an entirely original product and if an established market doesn’t exist for you to easily enter then how are you going to get your product in front of people who want to buy? 

In a lot of cases they might love your product but if a market doesn’t exist for you to easily market to then they’re not even going to be looking for your product to solve their pain and therefore no sales. You simply must have an existing market for your product.

Let me illustrate this with an example…

In 1999 we released a software product that converted most document formats (Word, Excel, Quark, etc…) to HTML web pages so businesses could publish manuals, legal documents, charts, DTP documents etc to their Intranet or their web sites.  For 3 years we sold a good number of products but the marketing was horizontal and without a niche.  Then in 2002 we added PDF conversion capabilities to the software… this gave us a complimentary (massive, existing) market to push our tool into and the HTML conversion capability provided an excellent unique benefit that set us apart from the competition.

Suddenly we were growing about 20 - 100% per month for the following 2 years!  Wow I wish we’d known this when we started!

The point I’m trying to illustrate is that the original idea we had for an HTML converter was great and the tool really useful, but we didn’t have an easy way to get the product in front of potential customers that was within our budget.

Of course if you’ve got a sizable budget or you have VC (yuck) then this advice can be ignored and you have enough money to create a market if your product is good enough.

If you’re a small self-funded or revenue-funded business then I hope you can learn from our mistake… it’s a key part of the Success Recipe that is vital to small business success.

Online Business Success

This is one video every single small business / SOHO owner should watch at least once.  It doesn’t matter if you know all this stuff already or if you’re already successful – this is a great motivational piece that spells out what 99% of entrepreneurs  should be focusing on.

David’ core message is: forget trying to be the next Facebook or MySpace… focus instead on choosing a niche market which has a real problem that your business can solve well.  Simply put, yours odds of success are far far higher.

David is an owner of 37signals, one of the most successful web 2.0 companies and their ideas and principals have shaped a lot of what we see today in the web SaaS (software as a service) type business space.  While this video is discussing technology businesses, the message is the same across the board – it doesn’t matter if you’re in real-estate or software.

Here is the link to the full-size original: David Heinemeier Hansson at Start-up School 08

Online Business Success