5 Easy Things You Could Do With Your Business Idea
0 Comments Published by Louis Adekoya March 18th, 2007 in BlogDo you have one or several business ideas that you have been nursing but just haven’t been able to take to the next level? Well, you are certainly not alone. I for one (and I am sure there are many like me) find that I can’t stop coming up with new business ideas, most of which I am simply not in a position to turn into a real business.
So besides the usual advice to write a detailed business plan, seek angel investment or apply for a patent – all of which could take considerable time and money to do, what other things can you do with relative ease either to see if your idea is any good or to get some traction on it?
Well, here is my list of 5 – please feel free to suggest more.
1. Submit Your Idea to IdeaTagging.com
In my opinion (totally unbiased of course:grin:), the Idea Tagging is an excellent way to find out what people might think of your business idea and/or to get new angles to your idea that you never even knew were there. The beauty of it is that you can do this without even revealing your idea. In case you didn’t already know, the way it works is that you submit clues to your business idea in the form of tags (keywords that relate to your idea). Other readers then try to guess what your idea is and you and can rate their attempts. The important thing is that people’s guesses will spark new ideas for you and everyone else that reads them.
2. Boggle It
I stumbled upon BoggleIt a couple of months ago. For £99 (approx. $190 at the time of writing) BoggleIt will assess your idea in confidence and in about 10 working days produce a detailed report on their view on its chances of success and results of any patents that they find which relate to your idea. If your idea scores highly enough, BoggleIt will invite you to discuss the possibility of them helping you to turn your idea into a real business.
I have used the BoggleIt service and I found it very comprehensive. You fill out an online questionnaire which forces you to think properly about your idea – it took me about 50 minutes to fill mine but it might well have taken longer had I not already written down detailed notes on my idea.
3. Get Funded Without Having a Business Plan
There are some a few investor companies out there to which you can apply for funding without having to write a business plan. Others will let you enter into a business idea contest – again without a business plan. I have listed just a few of these companies here
- Y Combinator – who have funded the likes of Reddit and Weebly.
- TechStars – covered in this TechCrunch post.
- Ideawarz
If you do have a business plan or executive summary, there are numerous business plan competitions you could try, some of which are listed at this link.By the way, on the subject of business plan or no business plan, there is an interesting post titled Is a Business Plan Necessary? by Guy Kawasaki that I found interesting.
4. Post Your Idea to an Ideas Database
If you don’t mind revealing your idea and want to get people’s feedback on it, you may want to try posting it to one of the many idea databases that exist on the internet. Just be aware that if you put something out there in the public domain, you jeopardise your ability to get a patent for it. Below are a few idea databases you could try:
5. Get Your Invention Licensed
There seems to be no end to the number of companies that claim they can help secure a licensing agreement with a manufacturer for your invention. As you may have read recently, some of these so called invention marketing companies charge a lot of money and yet have zero percent success rates. Therefore I will only mention one invention marketing company of which I have first hand experience. The company is called Trevor Baylis Brands plc and it operates out of the United Kingdom.
I also found this website offering advice to inventors on dealing with invention marketing companies. It is probably worth checking it out if you are going down this route.
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