Your best chance of success as an entrepreneur is to offer a product or service that’s unique to a marketplace that needs what you and your business have to offer.
Charlie Warner, for example, has been a lifelong comedy fan. He retired as a marketing vice-president for America Online and wanted to start his own enterprise. So the New York City resident launched DailyComedy.com, which provides users with new comedic material every day, including videos designed specifically for the internet, and allows users to create a comedy “stage� where they can post their own jokes and videos.
Rich Bianchi was an executive at Honeywell, the computer company, and noticed that no tools existed to help the employees on his project teams answer the basic question: what are the most important things I’m supposed to be doing today? So he founded Alexsys and came up with a project-management software package called Team Pro, which now is used by hundreds of organizations around the world.
There’s no better place for your startup business to be than alone in a promising business niche. A lot of upfront searching and thinking can help you discover, and perhaps create, just the space in the marketplace that will separate your company from the pack.
Matt on February 22nd, 2007 at 3:04 pm
I agree with the niche idea, but I don’t agree you have to have a new idea. A lot of people don’t start a business because they are waiting to have a great, unique idea they can dominate the market with, and it hasn’t come to them yet. I think the “secret” to starting a business is to do something that already works, but is just a little better than what is already out there. This is a formula that works every time, and you don’t have to wait for that eureka moment!