Your Business Focus

There are two ways of thinking about your business focus:

What do I want to sell?

What do people want to buy?

Following the thousands of conversations I've had with startups and small businesses, many make the mistake that they only need to focus on one of these.

But that's wrong.

You need both components to be perfectly balanced at all times.

Yes, you need to find something that you are excited about, that you have expertise in or that you have a real passion for.

But that doesn't mean anything if nobody wants to buy it.

The coolest invention in the world can also be something that nobody actually wants.

You have to make sure that what you are offering is something that the marketplace are looking for.

Let's take a look at the other focus - what people want to buy.

This is actually really hard - because they don't usually know.

The challenge is people don't always know what they do or don't want or need - they rely on something being shown to them for them assess whether it is useful to them.

If you are lucky, you will have heard people complaining of their pain points and they align with the products or services you want to offer.

Mostly, there is a degree of creating something and then putting it to test in the marketplace.

This is why you create a minimum viable product - the most basic version of your offering, so that the market can tell you if they want it or not.

Or how it would need to change to be more valuable to them.

At all times, founders need to keep these in balance.

What do you want to make?

Do people want to buy that?

Do your research, get your feedback from potential customers, accept that your perfect product or service may not work for the market and get ready to change and shift if necessary.

It's better to have a business that meets a customer need than a perfect product or service with no demand.