Entrepreneurs are born, not made. One does not decide to be an entrepreneur.
Today we are going to discuss the wannabe Young Turks who venture to begin a startup or new business. The mere idea of starting a new business is too fascinating. But, having an idea and executing that idea is akin to cheese and chalk. The problem starts when brainstorming begins — ‘What product or service to sell?’
Many ask for valuable insights from friends and family. There are countless Social Media sites where strangers discuss ideas. Few succeed in having meaningful discussions and get insights and most of them fail to meaningfully reflect and build castles in the air.
When a discussion takes place, it is within a certain niche group E.g.: Facebook closed group; with sample size — just a handful. The brainstorming commences isolated from the potential customers. Also, the bias of people participating in the discussions is not considered. If these factors are taken into account, the proposed plan might fluctuate and NOT help make decisions based on the exchange of information. In other words, this situation is somewhat similar to having outliers that cause experimental errors and results in serious problems in statistical analyses.
The budding entrepreneurs are not familiar with the market trend or not exposed to any feedback from potential customers. Moreover, they are not into any market research as they rely heavily on word of mouth or data sourced from a group. Data does not mean anything unless it is properly sourced and analyzed.
When the would-be businessman finds an idea (sourced from discussions) sufficiently exciting, he tries to sell that idea in the market depending on the brilliance of that idea that he “assumes” would sell. When that idea flops, he sits with his team to analyze what went wrong and *then* kick-starts research. The troubleshooting starts when the damage is beyond containment.
This is a backward approach.
A Backward Approach is used for Visualizing Information Flow in Deep Networks. In Mathematics, Backwards calculations are prevalent in solving mathematical problems. In Politics, after a landscape defeat, a party analyses root cause via backward approach. In Data Analysis too, a Backwards approach is employed. It is possible to start with the end result. Working backward, a developer assumes constants and then gets to the root of the decision tree by replacing constants with functions or objects. In Dynamic Programming, the program is divided into subproblems and each subproblem can be solved only once. The subproblems are conditional or dependent to solve the rest of the program. The optimal solution is reached via backward or a reverse-engineering approach. After using the computed process of the smaller problems one can easily construct an optimal solution.
But for a business model, the backward approach doesn’t always work. You cannot attempt to sell your product or services based on your ideas alone and then do a market analysis. You got to know the taste, preference, objectives, feedback of your customer base *first* and then design your product accordingly.
The key to a successful business is to serve a well-defined market sector by providing a quality product or service. Set out to discover a want or need that is not being met, a problem that is not yet solved. Planning and preparation before the product is tested or launched is Key and would prove to be eye-opener before launch of product to the market. Then the profits would be waiting for you in the market.
You might have many once-in-a-lifetime ideas that strike like a lightning bolt, but it is not worth it. First, you must start exploring the market you want to serve. Ideally, THAT will be the market for you.
Keywords: Backward Approach, Business, Social Media, Entrepreneurs, Dynamic Programming, Deep Networks, Data Analysis, Mathematics, Facebook, Twitter, Statistics, Young Turks, Data