What to do with your *Genius Idea*
Part One
After years of asking advisors for advice, investors for investment, and friends to introduce me to their big-breasted friends, I’m experiencing “Ask Fatigue.” The antidote? Giving my experience, lessons, and mistakes some airtime. In case someone else has a million dollar idea and needs a safe space to get started that doesn’t come from a guru, Harvard MBA, or generally unrelatable over achiever.
Who am I? Just a girl with a genius idea, quickly approaching the ship date for my products; two products that have taken multiple iterations, flights, designers, and thousands of dollars to achieve.
For anyone who has ever had a Shark Tank worthy idea, I implore you to start here.
Validating a product idea
TLDR, the basic premise of having a business is selling something people want. You can spend years building a product to sell, but you shouldn’t even bother if you don’t know for sure they want it.
So start with asking, is this idea something people want and would pay for?
The Ultimate Thought Experiment for Wannabe Entrepreneurs
As with everything, start with Google:
Is there a product already out there? Is it popular? What are the reviews like?
Consider how your product might differ from theirs. Function, style, branding, price, ???
Price is a tough way to compete. How are you going to do something cheaper than someone already doing it and presumably buying way big orders (IE paying less per unit?). Do your parents own a factory in Taiwan? If not, don’t rely on this.
Brand - unless you’re Emma Chamberlain, starting another coffee company with a cool brand vibe might not be it. This is the exception.
10/10 recommend creating something that’s functionally better than what’s out there. Our niche is women with big boobs and small bands and side sleepers. We’ve looked and nothing fits, supports, and is comfortable for sleep & leisure.
If it doesn’t exist, why not? Is the math not mathing? Is there not enough need?
For my biz, my search terms were “Sleep bra,” “bralette for big boobs,” & “Boob pillow” as well as benefit search terms, like “how to prevent chest wrinkles” and “benefits of sleeping in a bra.”
Spend hours here. Stick the links in a spreadsheet. (Here’s a template)
Talk to people (outside of your friends or family) who might have this problem (for me, that was women with big boobs).
I asked friends to introduce me to friends who had big boobs so I could get on the phone with them for 10 min or have them fill out an anonymous boob behavior survey. The more the better. I got about 30 people and used product reviews and niche Reddit sub-threads to gather the rest of my intel.
Ask them, would they pay $XX for your product if it delivered X benefit?
Try and truly understand, out of a sample size of potential customers, how many people are SUPER into having your product exist? Is it 10%? 25%, 50%, 80%?
Build MVP: This is the minimum viable product. Something cheap and fast to see if there is energy and enthusiasm to draw upon.
For instance, if you want to create a vegan dating app, throw a speed dating event at your local vegan coffee shop one evening and post flyers, email your networks, post on vegan Facebook/Reddit threads, etc. Do people show up? Give them a survey to find out things like what percentage of them only date other vegans?
If it’s a physical product, this is a bit harder.
If there is something similar, can you send that product to a few potential customers and ask for their feedback on the product, what they like, what they’d want different?
Create social media ads for the product using drawings and description of product and benefits and see how many people you can get to sign up for your email list via Instagram.
For more MVP ideas, you can DM me, brainstorm with a friend, or use ChatGPT.
If you’re angsty and want to skip all the above and just plow a path forward, WOW, did we have the same dad? The point of this exercise is to poke holes in your idea. To save you from hours, months, years, and thousands of dollars of loving something that will not love you back. When you’re staring down the barrel of an empty bank account with half a deposit paid in a foreign land and your friends are on a PTO vacation, you’ll need to remember you did this exercise.
If you’re realizing you need to hold off on quitting your day job, keep your eyes open and continue noodling, learning, & paying attention until you do find that ONE THING.
If after all this, you’re emboldened by the response you’ve received, hooray! That’s HUGE. Be sure to check back in for next week’s edition:
Would I Hire Myself as CEO of this Company?