Too many people have a great idea but don’t make anything out of it.
Some are afraid of failure, some are afraid of the pressures of success, and some just want to tell people about their ideas, just for the sake of doing so. Here is a general step-by-step guide to taking an idea and turning it into a business.
Once you get an Idea…
1. Talk – Share your idea with your friends. Don’t worry about someone stealing your idea. Feedback will triumph over excessive paranoia. Take all feedback objectively, but consider them all.
2. Write it down – Putting things down on paper gets a lot of things out of your head and onto an initial plan. Don’t worry about structure, all the analysis just yet. Put down everything that comes to your head first. Getting this out of the way paves a much easier path to sit down in the future and do up a proper business plan.
3. Assemble a team – Pick your people based on motivation, communication, and skills. The lack of any one of these attributes will result in a higher likelihood of your team not reaching its full potential and morale being affected adversely. Having an especially cohesive team is essential, as a start-up will take a much longer time to reach a point of big rewards.
4. Find a deadline – Make your own deadlines and set your own lofty targets. Break things down into small tasks each which its own deadline so that you at least make baby steps towards the final goal. Failure of this will likely result in procrastination and unnecessary slowdown of the project
5. Manage the team – Be decisive. Insist on reasonable commitments on team members, and don’t be afraid to seek out new blood if they don’t reach expected levels of commitment.
6. Rinse and repeat steps 4 and 5 until you get into business – Constantly seek out new goals to meet, and manage your team based on those goals on deadlines.
Simplistic as it sounds, these are practical steps that will move you in the right direction in a timely manner.
Source: Friedbeef’s Tech.