My first task for my “Starting a Business” class was to think of a business I wanted to work on for the entire semester. I brainstormed for about a week and half about potential ideas. I found the most useful formula for plausible ideas came from combining three things:
- Something I’m interested in
- Something I know how to do (or at least have a clue about)
- Something that people will pay for
In the end I settled on an e-commerce website that sells consumer electronics. I’ve always been interested in gadgets and gizmos so consumer electronics matched that interest. A large part of my current job can be categorised as “web stuff”. While my skills are much more refined on the marketing and content side, I understand the programming side enough to be dangerous. So, creating an e-commerce website isn’t too much of a stretch for the something I know how to do category. In order to figure out something people would pay for I needed to find a good angle about purchasing consumer electronics. We’ll explore that in the next post.