How to Choose the Right Kind of Business

The first and foremost requirement to build your startup is - deciding your business type. What is the business idea? Or, precisely, how to choose the right kind of business? Well, there is no specific answer to this. But here is our guidelines to help you start off the right foot -

Decide Your Expertise/Niche

If you are a software engineer, we won’t recommend you to start a restaurant unless you have proper expertise and resources in that field. Because, a startup should be based on the domain you have some expertise in. And no matter from which sector you are, there are always a lot of ideas to explore. So, first define your niche/area of expertise. It is a good practice to write it down - your niche areas, skills, experience in those specific areas, exposure to the related technologies & tools, and others. If possible, try to rate yourself as well to know exactly where you stand, your strengths, and weaknesses. This step is the foundation of your startup, and so being transparent to yourself will help you in the next stages where you will need to plan your budget, resources, and others.

Here’s a checklist to help you execute this step -

Your expertise
Your skills sets
Your strengths related to your niche
The areas where you may need more help like with certain tools, technologies, processes etc.
Your professional experience in the related fields
How relevant/up-to-date your knowledge/experience is in the present time

These basics will help you in executing the next step as well.

Generate Idea

Ideas are everything for a business provided you execute it right. Your idea should be unique, effective, and realistic at the same time. Here, this uniqueness factor is tricky, it is not necessary that the product you are going to develop must be the first of its kind in the world. But the solutions you are providing through it must have some USP (Unique Selling Proposition) in it. The USP is what will differentiate your product from the other similar products or your competitors’ products in the market.

Based on your expertise/niche/type of field you have chosen, list out the pain points in the existing market. It is a good approach to generate a unique business idea. Any business/startup is focused on a specific product (or a set of products), or services that are meant to provide a specific solution. For instance, for Uber it is online vehicle booking and ride giving services, for Dollar Shave Club it is subscription-based shaving kit products, for Netflix, it is subscription-based OTT (Over the Top) content, and so on. Similarly, to start your business, you need to decide on the products or services you will be offering. Do such products or solutions already exist in the market? If yes, then you must ensure that your products/services have something unique or more effcient in them. For example, if you are launching a grocery delivery app, then maybe offering the fastest delivery can be your USP that will help you drive the end-users’ attention. Take your time and brainstorm until you think you have got your business idea. Remember, either you are targeting the pain points of your target area/market that are yet to get a solution, or you are solving them in a more effcient way than your competitors. Having a well-defined idea implies you already have cracked it - you have chosen the ‘right’ kind of business to start!

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