Preparation

Assessment: Assessing Your Idea

In order to succeed, your product or service must meet the customers’ needs. How do you know that it will do so? What research and testing have you done? What experiences – your own or other people’s – can you draw on? What does it tell you?

Too often, people start businesses that make products or provide services that they know, without looking at what the market wants to buy. The best businesses start by identifying a market need and then filling it.

Ask yourself whether your product or service is right for the market? Waterproof raincoats may be a better bet in Ireland than convertible sports cars, for example.

Then ask whether your product or service is ready for the market:

• Have you ironed out all the bugs and problems?
• Will it work under all possible conditions?
• Is it totally fool-proof?
• If it’s a service, have you trained staff to provide it?
• Can they do so, even when you are not there?

Unless your idea is both right and ready for the market, you won’t have a business.

Now move on to consider the other aspects of assessment:

• Yourself
• Your team (if you have one)
• Your family
• Your idea
• The market.