One easy way to come up with your 2020 business idea

Here is a guest blog from Income Connection, a partner of Apt Wealth. 

What problems do people seek your advice about?

Think about times when people have asked you for help. What was it about? Is there a common theme?

At work you might be the ‘go-to’ for certain types of questions – where you are asked to contribute because of your abilities rather than your job title.

Or in your personal life, do people ask you for advice and help? Modern life is complex; perhaps there are some problems that you have solved or hacks that you have worked out that would make life easier for others?

Could you help people overcome something that you once struggled with?

You see, there may be something that is easy for you that is hard for other people.

Think of the conversations that you are drawn to where people ‘lean in’ to what you say.

Here are two examples of people who build successful businesses by sharing their wisdom with others.

Anna Digilio is an experienced primary school teacher who used her expertise in teaching primary school maths to develop resources to help other teachers around the world. She sells her resources online and has built a million dollar business.

Dr Bonnie Koo is a dermatologist who found herself answering financial questions in a Facebook group from other female doctors. The same questions kept coming up so she answered them in a blog. She turned her blog into a $225,000 p.a. side-gig.

So perhaps you have a couple of ideas in mind?

You may be thinking:

‘I need more education’

Or

‘Why would people pay me for this advice?’

Or

‘I don’t know everything about this topic’

You are in good company, many businesses start here.

The most important thing is what you do next. Move forward by:

1. Adopting the mind-set of placing value on your advice. Take courage and see the ‘bigger picture’ opportunity to help to more people – increase your impact.
2. Appreciating that you don’t need to know everything on the topic, just what your target customer is needing help with (which is likely what you are already doing)
3. Recognising that many successful people experience impostor syndrome, such as Ariana Huffington, Maya Angelou and Howard Shultz, the founder of Starbucks.
4. Not holding yourself back because you want more formal education. I have completed many years of formal education, but I have found that short courses, workshops, books, YouTube, podcasts, websites and other practical sources of timely information have better equipped me for starting and running a business.   

The next steps are to:

1. Test the waters by turning your advice into a ‘product’ or an ‘offer’. You test your ‘offer’, learn and refine it with feedback from customers.
2. Start building an audience of potential customers, so that when you are ready to launch, you have some people to sell it to.

By starting as a side-gig, you can take an iterative, low risk ‘learning’ approach. You then scale up when you achieve product/market fit -when sufficient paying customers through their purchase behavior are telling you that your product is a ‘fit’ for your market.

Perhaps you have a few fears. Fears of being pushy, being ‘out there’ with your offer. Perhaps you are afraid that people are too distracted by COVID-19 to be interested in other things. However, sales are up in many categories – people are spending more time online because people actually want to put their attention elsewhere.

About Melinda Livingstone and IncomeConnection

Since starting in 2017, IncomeConnection has helped hundreds of people start successful businesses, side gigs and find sources of income. Before setting up IncomeConnection, Melinda established successful businesses and award winning products as Head of Growth Strategy for Colonial First State and Head of Product Development and Marketing for Bridges.