You want to start your own business but don’t have an idea yet. With the right approach, you go from a blank slate to a validated business concept within 6 months or less. A perfect fit business requires self-assessment, ideation, research, and validation.

Assess interests and skills

Start by making a list of your passions, interests, hobbies, and talents. What topics energize you? Where do you have unique expertise or experience? What skills do you want to leverage? What values do you want to exemplify? What business activities excite you – creating, selling, designing, manufacturing, serving? What types of products or services interest you? Write down all your areas of enjoyment and natural ability. Aligned businesses are born from this groundwork. Identify your strengths and maximize your success. Now use your assessed interests as a stimulus to brainstorm tons of potential business ideas. Let ideas flow without overthinking initially. Bounce concepts off trusted mentors who know your strengths to gain valuable outside perspective. how much is yours worth? Online resources come up with small business ideas. Ideate tangential ideas based on your interests. Turn an interest in photography into a business by refining broad ideas. Capture every business idea with potential. Be broad in your creative ideation before narrowing it down.

Screen ideas based on preferences

Start screening your long list of ideas to identify top contenders aligned with your preferences. Which match your desired income level potential and target work-life balance? Which utilize skills do you have or have an interest in developing? Which aligns with your values? Which meet your preferred criteria around location/travel, start up costs, complexity, competitive landscape, and more? Use weighted, scoring criteria tailored to your personal goals to rate and compare each idea. This initial screening eliminates options clearly mismatched to want so you concentrate on contenders matching your vision. Be ruthlessly selective at this phase.

Conduct market research

  • Industry profitability, growth trends, and size
  • Competitor landscape, offerings, and saturation
  • Pricing models and willingness to pay
  • Customer demographics and demand dynamics
  • Sales and marketing channels
  • Macro trends and regulatory issues
  • Opportunities, weaknesses, and threats

Isolate business ideas situated in lucrative, fast-growing markets where you could compete successfully through differentiation.

Develop basic business model

Choose your 1-2 most promising ideas from research and draft a preliminary business model and plan to define your competitive positioning, operations, and financial projections. Outline:

  • Product/service features and benefits
  • Pricing strategy
  • Target customers and distribution channels
  • Competitive advantages
  • Key operational resources and processes
  • Revenue streams and cost structure
  • Expected profitability and key assumptions

Conducting this high-level business modeling reveals if your modeling ideas be viable. If models appear unworkable, reassess.

Validate concept and demand 

Once you have a model with indications of viability, take your final idea(s) and validate actual market demand.

  • Lead capture landing page
  • Surveys and customer interviews
  • Searching for related online communities to engage
  • Pre-sale offers and asking for deposits
  • Running small targeted ad campaigns
  • Applying to startup incubators or accelerators

Gather tangible proof that customers want and need your proposed product or service. Validate before diving into the formal launch.