š”IDEATION
This is the fun part. This is when your ideas start coming to you. But itās also a time to pause and figure out which is the right one for you to pursue.
I highly recommend reading this article: Ideas Are Meant to Be Thrown Away, before doing anything. Itās a quick primer for anyone thinking about taking their idea to the next stage.
The visual below is another great guide to help you with the ideation phase. Kudos to John Rush for putting this together: a simple flowchart that maps out where potential ideas can come from. Itās a decent status check for your own idea to ensure itās coming from the right place before you even get started.
Brainstorming
Ideas can come from anywhere at any time, and brainstorming helps with the process of generating those ideas.
While there are several brainstorming techniques you can use, from traditional mind mapping to random word association and many more, I generally encourage people to start their ideation journey from a place they know best.
Youāve got to find what gets you interested and sparks your curiosity. This could easily be a hobby, i.e., video games, outdoor activities, coding, music, woodwork, fashion design, etc. Whatever it is, it CANāT BE BORING, and it needs to give you energy instead of taking it away. Doing this will motivate you to think about it more often, which in turn gives you more opportunity to find areas of improvement, optimizations, and gaps that others might not discover.
Itās also healthy to immerse yourself in activities that are different from each other. Doing this allows your brain to form connections between these areas that can potentially create new ways of thinking and unexpected opportunities.
Brainstorming is more of an art than a science. In most cases, you canāt force yourself to come up with solutions and problems to solve on a whim. It takes time and patience, and you might just find that new ideas come when you least expect them.
Pain Points
Existing pain points and problems are the bedrock of confirming that your idea has legs.
If you look again at the diagram (Ideation Flowchart) above, one of the best ways to check if your idea can lead to something is to verify if it addresses a certain pain point you're experiencing. If it does, then youāre on the right track.
To test this even further, itās time to do some basic researchāconfirm if other solutions out there have solved it. Chances are there might be, but if not, then you probably have discovered something very unique and the first to do so, or you havenāt done enough research.
But if there are other solutions out there, it proves that
https://www.entrepreneur.com/starting-a-business/every-business-needs-to-solve-a-pain-point-does-yours/487290