3 Ways to Seek Opportunities
ARTICLE #1*
3 ways to spot start-ups opportunities
Our story thus far…
I left employment back in 07 to do an MBA in Entrepreneurship with the UK’s Top Entrepreneurial University. I loved every MBA minute. When I finished I convinced one of my best friends, Simon Oxley, to leave his well-paid corporate job with all its benefits to start a business. We really did ‘burn our ships’ as we did not know what we were going to start-up in. We left ourselves no choice, no retreat!
However, we did have a lot of experience in the Tech industry and knew we wanted to sell b2b. We looked around and could see Web2.0 was moving into companies with Enterprise 2.0.
To get involved with this emerging trend we built and launched an Enterprise 2.0 informational website. The website proved to be great experience but did not and was not going to make us money. We decided we wanted to develop software but we needed to work out what we were going to build. Reflecting back I think we spent too much time figuring out what to do. It seems that this is a common problem for start-ups. We now know what we are going to do with our Aware Monitoring service.
Spotting start-ups opportunities
My MBA and on the job learning experiences have taught me many things on what, how and where to find start-ups opportunities:
1. Using prior knowledge :
Market experience is a wonderful thing. It brings deep understanding of customer problems; insider knowledge of the competitive landscape; awareness of market changes and there impact’s. This knowledge can be harnessed to identify new and emerging opportunities in a given marketplace. Warning: care needs to be taken that the opportunity is a “gap in the market” and there is in fact a “market in this gap”. Many market gaps are unfilled because they are a unprofitable. There is also no such thing as the ‘perfect opportunity’ and competition is inevitable. 2. See opportunities in Change : Change brings opportunity as I discussed with my ’5
3 ways to spot start-ups opportunities
Our story thus far…
I left employment back in 07 to do an MBA in Entrepreneurship with the UK’s Top Entrepreneurial University. I loved every MBA minute. When I finished I convinced one of my best friends, Simon Oxley, to leave his well-paid corporate job with all its benefits to start a business. We really did ‘burn our ships’ as we did not know what we were going to start-up in. We left ourselves no choice, no retreat!
However, we did have a lot of experience in the Tech industry and knew we wanted to sell b2b. We looked around and could see Web2.0 was moving into companies with Enterprise 2.0.
To get involved with this emerging trend we built and launched an Enterprise 2.0 informational website. The website proved to be great experience but did not and was not going to make us money. We decided we wanted to develop software but we needed to work out what we were going to build. Reflecting back I think we spent too much time figuring out what to do. It seems that this is a common problem for start-ups. We now know what we are going to do with our Aware Monitoring service.
Spotting start-ups opportunities
My MBA and on the job learning experiences have taught me many things on what, how and where to find start-ups opportunities:
1. Using prior knowledge :
Market experience is a wonderful thing. It brings deep understanding of customer problems; insider knowledge of the competitive landscape; awareness of market changes and there impact’s. This knowledge can be harnessed to identify new and emerging opportunities in a given marketplace. Warning: care needs to be taken that the opportunity is a “gap in the market” and there is in fact a “market in this gap”. Many market gaps are unfilled because they are a unprofitable. There is also no such thing as the ‘perfect opportunity’ and competition is inevitable. 2. See opportunities in Change : Change brings opportunity as I discussed with my ’5