Developing Great Ideas for Startups

Everyone has great ideas, and many of us have more than one. But how can you evaluate your idea to understand whether it’s good enough to launch as a business?

In order to help aspiring start-up founders, we have developed a 15-step thought process to help profile, quantify and evaluate start-up ideas.

This is done prior to a full business plan, and illustrates some of the practical requirements needed to convert an idea into a business venture.

There are fifteen steps to the process. While they appear linear, many of them are heavily iterative and you may often find yourself repeating steps or re-challenging assumptions the further you move into the process.

These are:

1. What Sets You on Fire?

2. Product Market Fit

3. Competitors

4. Defining & Defending your Product

5. Profiling your Ideal Customer

6. Market Size & Location

7. Market Access & Permission to Market

8. Testing your Product

9. Gaining your First Customer

10. Building your Team

11. Building your Capabilities

12. Finance & Costing

13. Pricing & Contracting

14. Getting Backed

15. The Give It All Up Test

This process will be explored in an online presentation by Philip Ammerman on 10 February 2021 for the Centre for Entrepreneurship at the University of Cyprus.

The presentation will be broadcast over Zoom; attendance is free.

We will add the Zoom links in the week of 25 January.