Making your business idea boxable
- By Ian Sanders -
- Nov 02, 2011
Entrepreneur guest blog on why making your ideas boxable can help turn your eureka moment into a business...
So you’ve got your great idea for a business. Perhaps it was a eureka moment in the pub or you had it sitting by the pool on holiday. Wherever you conceived it, now you’ve got to turn that raw idea into a business. A way to make you money, a product that people will want to buy. To do that, you need to make it boxable.
If your idea is a physical product it might be easy to visualise and communicate its benefits. But many of us have abstract ideas to sell: a complex piece of software or a consultancy service, neither of which you can touch and feel. Customers prefer concrete offerings over abstract notions, they ‘get’ boxes. So whatever it is you provide, whatever your product might be, think of it in a box. Wrap the idea into that box, stick a label on it and put it on a shelf with a nice big bow on it.
Making it boxable will help you shape and focus your idea. It will help you think about how you sell it, what price it will be, how it will stand out on the shelves. First you need to establish the single most compelling benefit that your idea offers the buyer. Not two, three or four benefits; the one benefit that stands out above all others. Identifying this single-minded proposition not only helps the marketplace ‘get it’; it also helps drive and motivate you. It will help you focus your efforts when you risk getting sidetracked or distracted.
For my new book with David Sloly ‘Zoom! The faster way to make your business idea happen’, we spoke to the co-founder of Leon restuarants, the London-based fast food chain. They have as their single-minded proposition: “if God did fast food” i.e. they provide fast food that’s healthy, ethical and of high quality. The proposition enables the restaurant chain to focus: every day they can always ask the simple question, is what they are doing today in line with their proposition?
So summarise your own proposition: get it tattooed on your arm if need be. In a crowded, abundant market packed with similar offerings, the only way you can differentiate yourself is by having a single minded proposition and sticking to it.
Now your idea is starting to feel more real. For the first time it is physical, you can look at it, share it and ship it. Shipping may not involve a brown box being dispatched from a warehouse, it might mean pressing launch on your website or opening your doors for business. But the act of shipping is essential. It enables you to get your product out to real customers, to get feedback and to make adaptations where needed. Guy Kawasaki author, venture capitalist and former chief evangelist of Apple told us that you’ll never know what is great until you get your product into the hands of real life customers, “You’ll learn more about your product in the first week after shipping than fifty two weeks thinking about and studying and doing focus groups. Your research is shipping, that’s what market research is: Ship”
Image by ahhyeah on Flickr
By Ian Sanders. Author, ideas guy and marketing expert, blogs at The Zoom Guys
This guest blog complies to Virgin.com terms & conditions.
