Never has it been easier to develop big moneymaking ideas. The hard part is finding a proven process that you can follow so we boomer males can create that business in our third acts.
And if you’re scoffing just a bit, you need to know this: According to the Kaufmann Foundation, boomers are twice as likely to launch a new business in 2015 compared to millennials.
To make things a bit easier, our friends over at earlytorise.com put up a recent post to help you know when you have a moneymaking idea.
How To Spot and Develop Big Moneymaking Ideas
“Having too many ideas can be a serious problem. At the beginning of my career, I had that problem. It kept me poor for many years. It would have kept me poor for the rest of my life had I not discovered the principles for prioritizing my many ideas.”
-Mark Morgan Ford, earlytorise.com
It’s Research. It’s Development. And It’s Testing.
Much of what Mark Ford has written about in the past 14 years has been on the subject of how to start and develop privately owned, personally run, entrepreneurial cash machines.
In those books and essays, he’s given the following advice: If you have a great idea and you want to make a fortune from it, you need to develop it into something that resembles an ongoing business.
He recommends you spend an hour or two every day moving your idea forward. Begin with a written summary of the idea, a model, or a business plan. Get feedback and make improvements. At the same time, find a way to test the marketability of your idea. The closer you can come to a live marketing test, the better.
He gives you two examples:
- If your idea is for a new book, you can test the basic concept by writing a 500-word outline and an introductory chapter. Then, based on that, you can come up with a dozen appropriate titles and test them as ads on Google or one of the ad networks. If one or several of your titles tests well, you will have some preliminary marketing results, an outline, and a first chapter that you can present to a publisher. Speaking as a publisher, Ford can tell you that if someone came to him with this much work done on a book idea, he’d give it a reasonable look.
- If your idea is for a product — say, a new line of jewelry — you could handcraft a few dozen samples and try to sell them. Maybe take them to a local flea market or auction them off on eBay. By incrementally improving the product based on demand — and keeping careful notes about sales — you may eventually have not just a physical product but also some proof that it can sell. Going to a large marketer with something like that would make much stronger pitch than going with merely the idea.
You read the entire post here. Let us know what you think. Have you had success in developing a moneymaking idea? Share with us below.
Do well.
