Building A Successful Business on Improvements, not on Inventions
Entrepreneurs believe that their big ideas should be revolutionary to get to the success they first set out to achieve. Many of them believe that all they need is an idea that will change the world, but that’s not the case.
These revolutionary ideas, such as the iPhone, or Facebook, tend to be few and far between. This is because most of the time, people don’t really like change. If it means changing a person’s behavior, which means that achieving industry disruption with one great solution is at best extremely difficult, and at worst, downright impossible.
The best way to create something revolutionary in any industry is to keep it simple because simple things are easy to introduce into a market. There’s no need for entrepreneurs to create something brand new for a great and successful business around that product or service.
These types of life-changing ideas are usually quite expensive to develop to get to the result. They also take a lot of time to develop – which is not something that entrepreneurs are looking for. This means the next best thing in creating a successful business as an entrepreneur is not to create something brand new, but instead to try to improve upon something that already exists.
One of the great benefits of improving a solution that already exists is that there is already a market for that idea. There’s no need to go through the additional obstacle of creating a brand new market. It’s also relatively easy to come up with good improvements for things that already exist.
There are only a couple of downsides to this thinking – one of them is the fact that sometimes, coming up with a good idea is more difficult than others realize. But all it takes is some practice and some time, and anyone can get to that point.
The other downside is that after coming up with a great idea to innovate and improve upon a solution, is the fact that it takes a lot of time and money to test that idea. However, there’s still a good thing to this point as well, because as we previously mentioned, there is already a market for that solution, and there are no expenses in creating a brand new market for this new solution.
One example of improving an already established product is the inventor of the new Ketchup bottle, Paul Brown, who started wondering how people would have an easier time getting the condiment out of its bottle and wired with Tim Socier to make a mold for a valve that ended up being the perfect solution. This perfect solution was then sold in 1995 for around $13 million.
All of this shows entrepreneurs anywhere on the globe that there is no reason to create a brand new product when it’s a lot easier to improve the ones that already exist, and people are using them.
