From Idea to First Steps

Well, Congratulations for the new idea that you have come across. In my view no Idea is stupid or irrelevant. You just need the right approach to implement it. And yes it is true, every idea holds to either solve a problem or generate revenue and profits or create value for the customer or do all the same things at the same time or many other things that maybe only you have an idea about. If you fail to create the right ecosystem that runs on the principle of your idea, then you say that your idea failed. Actually the Idea did not fail, the eco system did. From General mind-set perspective, business is primarily done to earn profits but have you ever wondered why there are a lot of open source products available for use? This question is relevant only if you consider business activity from the point of view of only profits. And I leave you to ponder upon it.

Now coming back to the term I used above, “the eco system” that you are going to build needs to be represented in an intangible form. A business model is what gives you a macro view of your ecosystem. Any changes in your model will affect the entire ecosystem and related activities. The right model comes after a lot of iterations, sessions of brainstorming, research, and improvement before you have even started spending a dime in the infrastructure. Isn’t that cool? After the model has gone through various testing phases, risk mitigation processes, revenues and cost analysis you take the call of physically implementing the model. Of course practical scenarios may sometimes ditch you but to resolve it you’ll go back to the model and tweak it as per the problem.

Great tool for generating business model is a business model canvas from Strategyzer. I have been using it for some of my clients. Another important tool which when combined with the business model is UML Use case Model. It is a very simple, yet effective tool available in MS Visio, Smart Draw and It defines the technical system diagrammatically that will allow you to make changes in the system as you play in the business model.

If you have any trouble understanding any part of this article or you have any queries, I would like to answer them personally. Do not hesitate to ask.

Thank you.

-Anurag